A/N: Dee, you totally read my mind. I was working on this fic last night and I thought, ya' know, I should have time to post chapter five on Friday. And then about an hour later, up popped your review in my inbox. I was actually considering pushing the update off until Saturday, and your review reminded me that, oh yeah, there are people actually reading this aside from me.
Guys, if you haven't seen an update from me in a while, don't be shy about giving me a nudge. I get caught up in writing and tend to lose track of when I posted my last update- I actually thought I'd just updated this fic, but I see that I actually last posted on the 7th. This month has just flown by for me, for some reason.
Dragoon Dave- I'm glad you are enjoying thus far. This has been a really interesting piece for me to work on, and hopefully everyone will continue to find it interesting to read. We already know the story of FF VIII, and the game has already been novelized on this site (probably by better writers than I), so I figured I'd put a new spin on an old story. It allows me to take a run at something as epic in scope as a novelization while still getting to do my own thing.
RadiantRedWrath- Thank you as always for your reviews. I am glad to see that you find my action scenes fluid- fight scenes are something I love to write and tend to be kind of picky about.
catalysis- Hello! A new face- I'm always glad to see those. I'm very happy you are enjoying this so far, and I think it's probably my favorite story of mine as well, just because it's so different.
Guest- Thank you very much for your review. While I have to disagree that no other Seifer/Quistis writer quite nails their characterizations, I am nevertheless happy for the ego boost.
Tubby- You totally brighten my day. Thank you for your unabashed enthusiasm.
Chapter Five
Timber
I don't think hell is a 'where'.
I think it's a 'when'.
I think it's the moment when blood runs from the mouth of a man you just crouched down to save, when it geysers out the back of his skull, smears fingers of red down the tree at his back.
I think it's when you are just so tired that this man beneath your hands, who fought beside you, who had your back, who saved your friend- he begins to blur. He melts away into a number; he is not Mikel Brandon, with two children and a wife, with a fixer-upper on the beach where he was supposed to retire after just one more campaign.
He is the tenth man today whose eyes you have shut, whose blood smudges itself down your fingers and underneath your nails, and this is when you know it's time to get out, this blurring.
This is when you understand the trap that has been set, that you have already sprung: You can't care. You can't not care.
You bog down in caring, have to pull yourself free, stroke your way toward the surface through the copper-salt layers of all these broken, bloody men who died too soon. You want to know why; who chooses; why him why not you you are not special you don't have a family waiting for you to come home-
You drown in these copper-salt layers.
You do not sleep.
You barely eat.
You get to keep your soul.
This blurring, this morphing from man to soldier number- it sets you free, eases you down, lifts and lightens and takes away.
Not caring is a fog, and you stumble through it, grope your way uncertainly in the dark; there are no copper-salt men missing their arms, their legs, their heads; there are no questions; you do not wonder what happens to these men who are not going home to their families, who lay in pieces beneath your boots.
You are cocooned, enfolded, safe.
You lay your head down to rest at night and you do not weep for your fallen comrades; you sleep like the men who are piled all around you, who will never get to wake up again, who will never glare sullenly up into the rain clouds that gather on the horizon, who will never lift their boots just one more time, march forward just one final step, who will never again measure their lives by this lifting of their boots, this marching of their blistered aching feet.
But there's always a price, did you know that? You can sleep, eat, laugh, breathe without the weight of a hundred different memories pressing down against your chest- Ky Bentson held the line until you were safely away, until his head flew apart in a thousand separate pieces; Jence Kell left behind a letter for his high school sweetheart, just in case, just so she would know- but paying up, handing in your dues- that's when you gotta' decide what's worth it and what isn't.
So what'll it be? Peace or penance? Soul or sleep?
Make your choice.
I try to settle on something in between. I shut Mikel's eyes and I bend my head and there's this Hyne-awful burning in my own eyes- full of gun smoke, damn things- and for just a moment I think about this wife and these two kids who were going to get their husband and their father back, who were going to finish their house and hold barbeques on the sand and welcome grandkids up the sky-blue steps of their porch, and then I move on.
It's the only thing you can do. You wait too long, you stand around letting grief hang itself like a millstone around your neck, then you're not gonna' need to worry about that gun smoke in your eyes anymore or the dirt and blood and pieces of bone beneath your fingernails or the taste of dead man inside your mouth.
The recruiting posters never mention that, do they? All the little parts of your friends that you carry around against your tongue: Tim Han's brain and Janner Tenley's left finger and Kyler Denton's small intestine.
You will never rinse your mouth enough.
I step away from Mikel and shoulder my gun, walk away through the trees to other silent staring piles who have made widows of wives, orphans of children, and sometimes…sometimes you just wish there was a switch, you know?
This switch flips off the burning in your eyes and the squeezing in your chest and it holds this moment suspended until you have acclimatized, until seeing the little sixteen-year-old boy who lied about his age, whose name you never knew splattered in messy chunks against the trees does not bend you heaving at the waist, until one face blurs into another into another into another, until you do not remember the one very specific face you were looking for in the first place.
The Timber resistors don't have our numbers, but what they do have are guerilla tactics that more than even the playing field: You fight ghosts, shadows between the branches. Lotta' ambushes, which was what put all these good men on their backs beneath my boots.
Sometimes these wars, they just come down to luck.
Here's a valiant war story for you: I was way at the back, taking a leak, when they smashed into our front lines and took down our first two units, our best two units, and melted back away into the forest.
I fired two shots.
They both missed, wouldn't ya' know it. I'm handy with a gun, don't get me wrong, but here in the trees, inside the fog, everything just sort of runs together, forms a shapeless black blob that doesn't tell you whether you've trained your sights on friend or foe.
I think the sun is somewhere far above me, through layers of smoke-white that thicken as I walk.
Or maybe it's the moon.
You stop noticing, after a while. A soldier's sleep cycle is from when you can to get your ass moving and you learn pretty quickly that rain or shine, day or night, you drop where you are and you do not get up until someone kicks you in the ribs and rolls your groggy disgruntled ass into the nearest foxhole, before you get it shot off.
The mist falls. I feel its cool pinprick touch against my face, little greasy fingers picking through my stubble, and the ground sinks beneath me and my rifle shifts against me and I keep walking.
I bend over, flick another pair of lids shut over green-glass eyes, and there's this…this unmooring inside of me, I guess you could call it.
You ever feel like that sometimes? Like everything has suddenly let go, is now free-floating around inside you, getting all tangled up in one another, knocking into shit-
Ward, he…he's been on leave for a little while now. Went back to Balamb, to visit with his mother, to help her understand how to go on without her youngest son. Nice lady; went to see her a couple of times after boot camp, and then a few times when we are all on leave together. Always trying to set me up with someone: her next-door neighbor (eighty-year-old woman I suspect might have been a man at one point), other next-door neighbor (young thing, fifty pounds of makeup, questionable wardrobe choices and an even more questionable appearance on the same corner every weekday morning), the harbor's dockmaster (man; pretty voice, though).
You might be surprised to learn Mrs. Zabac can't even legally drive, on account of her eyesight.
Ward is on leave, but Kiros is not.
Kiros was with me in these trees. He marched on ahead while I stopped to take a piss, and while I am somehow now weightless, set adrift, I am also a thousand pounds: I drag my boots one by one through the mud, set the heel carefully down, press it deep, pull the other after.
You pray, walking through these bodies, looking at these faces, whether you are religious or not.
You pray so damn damn hard: Don't let the next one be him. Don't let me become one of these men on their knees, weeping over a best friend, a brother.
Don't let me find him inside this fog, underneath these trees.
If you have to…if you have to take him, at least let him die in the sun, in the light, in the warmth.
Under this canopy of bare winter branches like stark black brushstrokes there is only cold moist darkness, like this forest itself is a grave, like we have already been buried, and some of us just don't know it yet.
The fog reaches its cold soggy hand down into my lungs and I breathe, choke, cough; I drag, set, pull; I keep walking on and on and on.
I keep praying.
Kiros and I met before we were even born, as our mothers used to like to tell us. Probably were conceived at the same time, they used to chuckle.
Our mothers were big on oversharing. Like the time my mom giggled about this one technique of my father's- you know, let's not go there. Let's just shove that down deep, bury it as far as it will go. I was conceived thanks to a tricky combination of solar eclipses, ancient Trabian mountain rituals, and one timely delivery by a talking Chocobo, who dropped me off first, and then swung by Kiros' place on his way out. My father's magical man stick -AHHH MOM NOOO- had nothing to do with it.
We grew up climbing trees and breaking things (sometimes each other, although fights between us were pretty rare), and on weekends our parents traded off grilling burgers in the backyard and watched us run around like we were high on my mom's secret candy stash that we knew nothing about and certainly had not ransacked shortly before making our way outside with sticky lips that were definitely not rimmed in little hastily-chewed pieces of peppermint.
My mom and dad had just one kid, but I was never an only child.
If I…if I find him in the mud, trampled down into it or spread out above it…I don't…
How do you say good-bye, to someone who has always been there? How do you go on-
Just…I just don't…I don't understand. Tell me how. Tell me I am not going to find him-
I liked this girl, in sixth grade. Macie Darren. Cute blonde pigtails, even cuter freckled nose. She drew me a valentine in purple crayon and when I shyly accepted it, handed her back one of my own, she laughed and told me she was just kidding, that she didn't like ugly boys with long hair, that I looked like a stupid girl, and Kiros…he stepped right up next to me and told her that was fine, "Laguna doesn't like girls with fat pig noses who can't draw for shit," and she ran crying away to tattle. He got in trouble for making her cry, for the bad word, for not telling the teacher and handling it himself, but it made me smile when I'd been thinking about crying, it made me walk away with my head high and my shoulders back.
You never saw one of us without the other, in an entirely Heterosexual Life Partner kind of way.
I was the first one to learn about how he lost his virginity. (Uh, you know, besides the girl. Wowee could that be taken in the wrong way.) He was the first to know when my dad told me he was leaving, when he walked out the door before my mom even got home.
We traded toys, comic books, hand-crafted slingshots cobbled together from sticks I found in the streets.
We grew up (and up and up and up, as our mothers liked to say); we watched all our high school friends go their separate ways, off to their different lives; I wrote; he took up the violin.
We never grew apart. I showed him my first story; he shared his first crappy strains of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' on that busted old violin his mother found at a pawn shop downtown for twenty-five gil.
He plays real well now, you know. He took to it like he was born to it; he could make that busted old twenty-five gil piece of crap sound like it was weeping; he could make you want to cry with it.
I might find him here.
My next step might bump up against something solid, shift something lying limply outstretched beneath the dead winter leaves. His eyes will be open; he will look up at me without looking at me and I will remember the time we lit a bonfire in his mother's backyard with just a little moss and a couple of sticks; the way she yelled at us and sent me scurrying back home; how I picked up the old soup can with the string looped through a hole punched in its bottom and yanked it hopefully up to my ear, and ten feet away he did the same, and this string looped through holes in old soup cans pulled taut between our houses and we smiled and whispered and snickered over our cleverness.
I never thought about what I would do without that boy, not even when we joined the army together, not even when I watched the first man I ever saw killed come apart into hot red confetti around me.
He'd just always be there, I told myself. He always has been; there has never been no Kiros Seagill, for as long as I have been alive. We were born together, we will die together.
But dying is a journey you take alone. You might be helped through it by a kind hand on your shoulder and an even kinder voice in your ear, but no one goes into the light with you; no one helps you take your final breath or pumps your heart one last time; all you can do is hope it is over quickly, that you are gone before you realize you're alone, that no one is coming, that you are leaving everything behind and moving on to someplace you don't understand.
When you're young, you don't think about this journey. You always have another day, a next year, a tomorrow morning. You have heard about death and the way it lurks in between the cracks, trickles its way through to find you, but that's for the old-timers to worry about. You're busy living; you will lie down and wait quietly for death to seek you out one day when your dry matchstick bones ache from the cold and your brittle straw hair falls in clumps from your scalp, but not now; time to get laid; time to crash your first car, spike your first drink, break your first heart.
But war…it ages you decades beyond your time, shoves your face down deep into death and holds it there in place, until you drown in all this knowledge.
See, death doesn't care that you're only fifteen, that you have never fathered children, never stepped foot beyond the tiny town where you grew up. It doesn't give a shit that you never got to grow up at all.
Ask the kid who lied about his age, whose name I never knew. Death checked him off the list and moved onto the next, and this kid who told the recruiters he was twenty, who had the loudest laugh I've ever heard, he walked right out into hot steel rainfall and he never laughed again.
Never fired a shot, either.
He didn't even die a hero.
He just died. One moment he lived and the next he didn't, and what do you wanna' bet he never even saw the transition coming?
Yammering again, aren't I?
Deep breath, Laguna.
Think of…think of Julia. Dark hair, bright eyes, fingers that pour themselves like silk across white-moon keys.
Her hair always gathered up all the light in the room, reflected it back so hard it hurt my eyes, but I never got tired of looking at her; I wrote a lot of poems featuring that hair and the tiny little stars of illumination that sewed themselves into it, in the beginning.
That was before I stopped writing, before every time I put pencil to paper it came out like the ground that stretches itself out and out and out beneath my boots: thick with death, splattered in blood, devoid of hope.
Hope is a tricky thing, you see.
War washes away all of your hope like an ocean chipping away at a jetty; you are whittled down, worn out, carved into pieces. It keeps beating you down, hammering you low, until one day you can't get up anymore, until finally all the insignificant little shards of your hope are picked up by this ocean and taken out with the tide, like garbage.
I can see this in the faces of the men around me, in their doll-glass eyes. They toe another comrade onto his back and lean themselves wearily down on their rifles, wipe away a few tears and keep going, because, hey, not like they expected any different; not like they expected to find friends and brothers and lifelong companions blinking sleepily up at them in the fog, cradling broken arms or wrists or non-threatening flesh wounds.
You know what you're going to find, walking through these woods.
But, you know…this ocean that steals your hope has chiseled away at me, ground me down, and I still can't…I still can't picture his face somewhere on this ground, sandwiched between layers of others. He is my friend. He is more than my friend he is my brother and for my entire life he has been here; he has never left me behind; he has always given me someone to turn to and I can't lose this.
There is still this part of me that does not yield, that has not crumbled, a little kernel of a boulder beaten smooth but not yet eroded.
Sometimes you hurt so much this hurt reaches itself deeper, into another layer, pinches your nerves with this anesthetic fire that is so hot it freezes, so cold it burns, and what will this turn into, if I find him; how much worse will it get; tell me what I have to do, Hyne, God, whoever the hell you are tell me what I have to do to keep him-
Breathe.
In, out.
Heel, toe.
Breathe.
Think of Julia, Laguna. White stars in brown hair and jackrabbit heartbeats and little breathless compliments you can't push past the knot that ties itself inside your throat.
The first time I saw her, Kiros and I had just ducked into the hotel to have a quick drink. This was before Ward, before a little dotted line looped itself like shackles across our wrists and bound us to our government. Her hair was longer then; it poured itself across her shoulders all the way down to her waist, and I was pretty much a goner right then. Pretty women: My Achilles heel.
Kiros noticed right away, partly because he's known me all my life but mostly because my facial expressions are about as subtle as a Torama mating ritual- which involves a lot of noise and some rapeily forceful come-ons by the males of the species- and he got this little smile on his face and leaned across the table and told me to go talk to her.
I nodded and stood up and swaggered over to the piano like the manly man I am, and she never even knew what hit her, my masculinity overwhelmed her that much.
What I mean is that I leaned one elbow suavely down on the piano and said, "You're an amazing pianist," with my world-famous Laguna Loire Smile (patent pending), except somehow it came out a lot like "You're an amazing penis", which froze her fingers right on those keys and jerked her head up, her lips pressed into this thin little white line, and all I could do was stand there guppying my damn mouth open and shut, until Kiros' laughter finally unfroze my limbs and my feet turned themselves around and carried me stumbling back toward our table, where I hissed, "I just said 'penis' in front of that woman!" and Kiros laughed until he almost threw up all over the spotless white tablecloth beneath his cheek.
Yeah, he was laughing so hard he couldn't even sit up straight.
Asshole.
He…
The trees braid themselves together above my head, the branches are that thick, one vast black shadow-wall that knits itself together in the wind and then peels itself slowly apart, and these in-between moments, these gaps that show themselves like hints of teeth in a smile reveal the first hints of dawn pushing its way through fissures in the clouds.
Then the branches flap shut, and this faint pink dawn-light is sealed away again, and there is only gray forever.
I help a man struggling to turn over one of the bodies flip the guy onto his back, and then I step away as he chokes and goes down to one knee and bows his head against the body's mangled chest, and that's not going to be me-
Please.
Please.
I don't know what I believe.
I'm not sure there is a God. I'd like to think there is, but he's never helped me and I've never believed in the whole 'guiding hand' thing (what kind of deity would be cruel enough to turn that 'pianist' into 'penis' anyway) and I just don't know.
My mom believed.
Look at what happened to her.
Church every Sunday, bible before bed, and…well…
I can't think about that here.
But if there's something out there, just…just please. I don't know what else to say, how else to ask-
I top a little hill that swallows my boots to the ankles, and I see him.
My tongue has baked itself into this shriveled little lump inside my mouth. I am all mummified saliva and dry-dust throat and my boots slide to a stop in the mud beneath my soles and my rifle clanks itself noisily down against my armor and I inhale so hard this breath traps itself in my lungs and hangs there, burning.
You keep hoping, even when you know you shouldn't, even when all this hope that coiled itself up inside your stomach paid itself out inch by inch like a rope creeping up your chest and into your throat, where that damn ocean took it and hurled it into pieces against the rocks, and broke it into even smaller pieces when you tried to pick up the splinters.
I…
I…ah…got a little something in my throat.
He smiles at me.
Couple of them die like that; not sure if it's just the natural sort of expression their face melts into when there is no tension left to hold it in place or if they were thinking about someone they loved when they went, but it happens. Not often, but sometimes.
But his eyes are not glass, his eyes still see, and now he slings the strap of his gun over one broad armored shoulder and crests the hill where I still stand, sinking, and he reaches out with his long dark fingers and clasps my forearm and for a moment he just stands like this, gripping, pressing his fingers down deep into the bone.
And then he pulls me in close to clap me on the back and now my rigor mortis skin dissolves and all of me relaxes into a smile.
I lock this smile open around my teeth and slap his back even harder, and I am so damn glad; I drown in this gladness, let it suck me under, and I slap his back again and cock back one fist to launch a punch into his shoulder.
I pick up a pencil for the first time in months later that night, because for the first time in all these months I have not picked up a pencil, I have something else to share.
I learned about something that is more enduring than blood and death and even hope.
But let's get to that later.
"Do you remember your parents?" Seifer asks her suddenly, and she twitches one eyebrow up her forehead and winds her fingers together in front of her thighs, and where did this come from?
The fireworks tell her there was a family once, and she loved them.
But maybe…maybe they didn't love her.
The only letters she receives are from fans who do not care about the things she buries deep and smothers until they have gone so long without air they do not remember how to breathe. They want to know if she will marry them, what she does with her whip when she is not out on a mission, her bra size, and if she has ever fantasized about Darren Marks from Weapons 201, no reason, just a curious friend with a crush who wants to make sure she has no competition, and by the way, she's sort of inexperienced and does Quistis have any tips on the art of self-pleasuring?
She slips her fingers apart, sews them back together.
The fireworks tell her of a family that has not called, that has not visited, that dropped her off in Garden's polished echoing halls and left her there to die young.
It is not much of a family at all, she supposes.
The other children went away to live their own lives, to grow old and happy and together, to love and live and die warm in beds that cushion them softly all the way down into death.
"No," she says, watching these words paint themselves into the sky.
White on black.
Why is nothing ever so simple as these cumulous exhalations that flare like ghosts beyond her lips; white on black; stark words on an even starker background, no blending of the two, no in-between.
There is no gray, between this pale winter breath and starless midnight sky.
"Why?" she asks, watching him stretch himself out along the railing of the hotel room balcony, so casually, his arms flung carelessly over the thin layer of snow that frosts white the wrought-iron barrier. There is nothing stiff or upright or regimented about him, no military steel in his spine or caution in his eyes, and she would like to know just how it is that he lives from hour to hour, from day to day like this.
How do you take a step, when you are not sure where it's going to land?
He tips one shoulder up toward his ear. "Just wondering."
"Do you?"
He turns to her with both his arms still draped over the railing, elbows cocked up toward the sky, and now his smile stretches itself out, burrows itself deep, and a tiny star of a thing snaps on inside of her, smolders in her stomach like she has swallowed something hot.
It's the memory of his lips on her throat and his teeth in her skin that burns, and now she self-consciously reaches one hand up to scratch the spot on her neck and turns away with a scowl to look out over the black-river streets far below them. Out of the corner of one eye she sees him shift just slightly, smile even wider.
"Can't stop thinking about it, can you?"
"You mean your assault?" she snaps. Why can't he be ugly? Why does this smile that is just a little higher on the left have to mean anything at all to her- why couldn't she have just left him behind-
He isn't Squall. He isn't Squall and he will never be able to step into this hollow that Squall has carved deep and left empty, but sometimes when she is very lonely, when she thinks about how cold her bed is without someone there beside her to warm it, when she thinks about how she has offered up these little secret pieces of herself that she shows to no one and Squall only ever throws them back in her face with hardly even a look-
Sometimes she thinks about how Seifer Almasy would bed her in a heartbeat, would warm her sheets for just a night, and she wonders if twenty-four hours without this…this folding inside her, this curling tight and coiling up that hurts so badly, that chews down deep inside her where there are other layers of pain, would be worth it.
She's never slept with anyone before.
She has been holding onto this one last innocence, this final virtue she has left for him, for his rough keloid hands and his soft peppermint-gum breath, and for five years she has gripped it tight and not let it go, and he has not once looked in her direction.
He has not once sought her out first or picked her to be his training partner or sat himself down across from her at lunch, and for five years she has waited, and he's given her nothing.
Seifer Almasy would take her and use her and tumble back out of her bed just as quickly as he stumbled into it, but at least then she would not be pathetic; at least she would not still be waiting, hopelessly, helplessly.
She thinks about this, when she is lonely.
She thinks about how broad his shoulders are and the time she walked in on him changing in his room, his arms up over his head, shirt down over his face, and the deep grooves of his well-defined abdominal muscles, and the faint blonde trail of hair that terminates at the waistband of his pants.
He has probably slept with a hundred women. He will know exactly where to kiss and precisely how to rub, and he will leave her a limp dishrag pile in her bed without expecting anything more, and they will go on with their lives. He will smirk at her in class and wink at her behind backs and maybe once in a while they will rendezvous in the secret area or kiss their lips raw in the training room closet, and she will not be ironed flat inside because he does not want to stay, because he isn't looking for a commitment, and one day she will understand that you seize pleasure where you can, until it's your time, and you do not sit around waiting, praying.
There isn't enough time, for people like them.
There is time for brief crushes, one night stands, fumbling explorations in the dark.
Love takes a whole and breaks it down into parts, and then this whole -even if it is put back together along the seams- is shot through with flaws, will bend and crumble and break, and soldiers cannot bend and they are not allowed to crumble and once they break they are tossed aside to make room for those who are still faultless.
She leans her elbows down onto the railing, watches him angle his body in toward her. "Who do you think this 'Laguna' is? Why do we keep dreaming about him? How is it even possible, for us all to have the same dream?"
He shrugs again, looks out over the streets, toward the center of the town and the brightly-lit junk shop sign that shines like a beacon from in between all the peaked roofs and hand-carved mailboxes and sidewalks patrolled by soldiers. "Who the fuck cares?"
She does.
She cares about Jin Zabac, who died too young in a foxhole, who left behind a gaping hole in his mother and his brother; she cares about the boy with no name, who lied about his age, and the man who wrote one final confession to his high school sweetheart, and the soldier who will not watch his children grow up. She cares because he made her, because she felt Laguna Loire's heart shrivel away inside his chest, because his throat clogged up with tears when he stretched his hand down to shut the eyes of a man he barely knew; because Garden has tried for years to stomp out all this caring inside of her, to stamp it down into something shapeless they can fill back up with whatever they want, but the only thing she has ever perfected is her exterior.
Her face is a blank slate down which all emotion washes to collect like rainfall on the ground at her feet, but inside nothing has changed; nothing has been smudged out or stamped down and she feels so much sometimes, and she just wants it to stop.
She wonders if he can make it stop for just a night, if physical pleasure can wipe all this away, blur it out, if his hands and his tongue and his hard warm body slapping itself against hers will take it all away, just for awhile.
But she doesn't want him.
She doesn't want him and just thinking about taking him into her bed first, not saving herself, surges bitter ashy bile up into her throat and squeezes her chest down into a pinhole; she doesn't want to be used she wants to be loved; she wants him to do it and she-
Stop.
Stop.
She looks back through the winter-webbed sliding glass door that opens onto this balcony where she and Seifer stand, and her eyes track all the way back to the room through which they entered this balcony, and they find his bent head and his slender thin-boned hand and the gun blade he balances gracefully across his knees, polishing rag draped limply across its edge.
She shuts her eyes.
Just for a moment.
Just for a moment she stands breathing in the cold winter air and the powdery old vapor of the air freshener that chugs and wheezes and puffs forth faint little breaths of fragrance that smell like something that has not quite died, that is still clinging on.
Beyond this not-quite-dead air freshener that is still clinging on there is the smell of snow, of winter approaching too quickly, of something she cannot quite pinpoint.
Soap. Soap and…something that might almost be cologne but isn't, because this something she can't quite pinpoint is coming from Seifer, and he once told her that 'cologne' is only a word invented by fags like Chicken Wuss, to make themselves feel better about wearing perfume.
"See something you like?" he asks, sliding one eyebrow up along his forehead, and now he spreads his hands and cocks his hips forward a little farther off that snow-dusted railing. "Feel free to touch whatever it is."
She wonders if he has ever loved, if he has ever looked past himself long enough to fall for someone else.
He sneers and he jabs and he scoffs because he doesn't understand.
He will never understand.
No one has ever reached down inside of him with just a look and uprooted everything they can find with just this one casual glance; he has never waited silently in the wings for just one more of these looks, praying it will linger, hoping it will stay.
She rolls her eyes and turns away from him with a shake of her head, and she can still feel his eyes piercing her, driving themselves all the way down deep into things she does not want him to see, and why does he have to look so hard; why can't he train his attention somewhere else.
Maybe she should sleep with him. It is a surefire way to get him to leave her alone, to shift his attention off her and onto someone else, to make him stop bothering her all the time.
But her eyes slip helplessly beyond this winter-webbed sliding glass door to his bent head and his rag-wrapped fingers and she can't do that; she cannot purge Squall Leonhart from her mind and her heart and her fitful thrashing sleep with another man's hands -and certainly not Seifer's hands- and maybe she is pathetic; maybe she is so damned pathetic she wants to loop her whip around this pitiful aching weakness inside her heart and strangle it down into nothing, but she can't help it.
She can't help it.
Once on a training mission he looked at her with this ghost of a thing across his lips, this faint phantom twist of a smile he flashed just briefly in her direction, just for a moment, and this faint phantom twist of a smile…it fueled her, kept her going all the way through this training mission, beyond fatigue and fear and failure, and running on just this soft insignificant little twitch of his mouth, she scored the highest marks of the whole class.
She stayed up late that night, thinking about this faint phantom smile and the things it did to her and the way it smudged the skin at the corners of his eyes just slightly, creasing the smooth skin beneath his long black eyelashes.
Sometimes she wishes…sometimes she wishes she could tell someone about these things that not-quite smile does to her, let someone else help her pull it apart and examine it piece by piece by piece.
She just needs some kind of meaning.
She just needs to know…she just needs to know that she is not alone.
Somewhere out there is someone who finds worth beyond how quickly and efficiently and many she can kill, who sees beyond her body count, who knows that in the mornings she drinks peach tea and in the evenings green, who knows that her favorite book is about a boy who lives among fairies, and never grew up.
Down in the streets, in an alleyway perpendicular to the hotel, a man is being stabbed to death. The soldiers who work him over aren't quick about it; he watches their mouths flap in between jabs, sees their boots arc up and their fists flash out and little red droplets add themselves to the pale stars of snow that squeeze themselves like salt from the sky.
She hasn't seen it yet.
She's too busy looking at Pubes with her vagina in her eyes.
"Wanna' see something funny?" he asks, giving himself a little push to heave himself up off the railing, turning himself away from those flashing fists and arcing boots and little red droplets that add themselves to falling winter constellations.
It's not like he has to protect her, to keep her from seeing. Hell, she's seen everything he has, understands that in this world some people are the ones getting stabbed and some are the ones doing the stabbing, and all you can do is try to keep yourself on the non-pointy side of this truth.
It's just…the fucking look she gets on her face. There is an in-between moment before her walls come up, a crumpling up and a folding in and then a smoothing back over, and he just goddamned hates it.
She spares him the briefest look she can, just a split second tearing away of her eyes, and in this split second he steps forward and nudges the sliding glass door open and lets a little heat leak into his eyes as Squall's head lifts slowly up from his task, and now they lock onto each other, size each other up, douche to man, and Seifer lets something that is not quite a smile flicker fleetingly across his lips.
In the far corner Zell hops around like the spastic asshole he is, bouncing on the balls of his feet, rolling his shoulders, throwing jabs and groin shots and smoothly-oiled roundhouses.
He shoots a little spout of Fire from his palm, and his timing is just fucking perfect, catching the fucker right when he bends over to press the flat of his hands into the tops of his boots -his boyfriend must love that kinda' bendiness- and now Zell puts a good couple of feet between himself and the carpet and Quistis turns all the way around to face him, eyes wide, and he collapses helplessly back against the railing once more, holding his stomach.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!" Zell howls, beating one gloved hand frantically down against the flames that eat away at the seat of his pants, and now Squall's hands freeze themselves where they are and Irvine cocks his head up from the barrel of his rifle, disassembled across his palms, and he just can't stop fucking laughing.
"Seifer!" she snaps.
"What? Oh, for fuck's sake, Trepe, that was the weakest fucking Fire spell that's ever been cast. I'd have gotten laughed out of class if I cast that my first time ever fucking around with magic. He'll be fine. The rest of us might not be as fortunate, though," he replies, gesturing to the black-frayed hole across Zell's ass.
"YOU!"
"Fucking calm down; it's not the worst thing that's ever happened to your ass, is it?"
Zell launches himself like a spear through the opening out onto the balcony and his stiffened neck jabs the front of his thick fucking skull into Seifer's gut before he has even caught his breath and now he teeters backward, slams his spine against the railing, and fucking hell, the asshole almost pushed him over the goddamned side-
An open-handed slap to one side of Wuss' head spins stars through his eyes but the guy's used to not thinking clearly, and now one hand flickers out and tangles itself in the fold of material at Seifer's throat and he is yanked forward, thrust up-
Zell's foot catches him in the pit of his stomach and he is suddenly upended, flipped face first over the asshole as Zell sprawls out flat on his back, and only a quick twist to one side saves his nose and smashes his cheek down into the pavement instead, and what the fuck does this asshole think he is doing-
He scrapes his hands up underneath him and rolls onto his back as Wuss scrambles lithely to his feet to loom angrily red-faced above him, and now an arch of his back kips him onto his feet and to Zell's left Quistis takes one tentative step forward, hand up, mouth open-
"Seifer, don't-"
His shoulder drives into the floating ribs down Zell's right side hard enough to lift him up onto his toes and toss him screaming back into the railing behind him, hands up in guard position, and now his hastily-chambered front kick is redirected away from Zell's dick by one quick downward swing of his hand so he barrels in low again, clamps his arms in a wrestler's bear hug around the dickhole's sides-
"You almost just knocked me over the side, asshole!" Zell plants a left hook on his ear hard enough to twist little black helixes of disorientation past his eyes and now behind him a pair of hands crash down onto his shoulders and tug sharply, shooting anesthetic winter down his left arm where one of these hands has dug itself into a nerve-
"Knock it off. You're going to bring this whole thing down on us."
She can just kiss his fucking ass if she thinks-
The hand that shoots anesthetic winter down his left arm discharges a flash of Thundaga into the muscle, just a little jolt, just enough to get his attention, and now his arms seizure open and Wuss slides himself neatly out of the way as Seifer puts both knees to the pavement hard enough to pop their caps.
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck let go-"
She sinks down onto the balcony beside him, brings her face in close enough for him to feel her soft fucking breath slide itself across his skinned cheek, and why the fuck is she always close enough to kiss when he doesn't even have time to savor it-
"Stop, Seifer. You heard what Martine said before we left. You'll be demoted. You're on shaky enough ground that he might throw you out of the SeeD program altogether if you get just a couple more infractions under your belt. I am in charge of this mission, and I'm not going to let you drag my reputation down along with yours. We have a job to do. You will do that job competently, quietly, and when I make my reports to Martine, I will have nothing but positive things to say about your performance." She grips his shoulder a little tighter, shoots a few more stretching little fingers of Thundaga down into the muscle beneath her fingertips. "Is that clear?"
"I said let go, Trepe. You're really fucking pissing me off."
"Seifer, do you understand what I'm saying?" she snaps.
He understands that a woman three times smaller than him is fucking humiliating him right now, that he will never hear the end of this from Irvine, or from that little fucker who started all of this shit-
"Let. Go."
He won't hurt her but Seifer fucking Almasy bends to no one's goddamned will, and she is not going to control him.
"Seifer-"
There is just the faintest loosening of her hand, and the second the pressure on his fire-chewed nerve eases he pops his elbow up and out, rips her hand off his shoulder, and for all the instructors yammer on about how goddamned fast Wuss is, they've gotta' admit he's no slouch either: He whips both hands forward to curl them around her shoulders and now a shove and he rides her down to the pavement, torso to torso, one palm slipping around to cushion her head as she flops back onto the cement, and a quick forward shift of his hips and now both his knees pin her arms at the biceps, fastening them down tight to the ground.
He's never seen her look so pissed.
It kind of turns him on.
"Don't feel bad, Quistis. You're used to dealing with Puberty Boy; I'm a lot more man than he is." He works his knees down a little, presses the points of them into the nerve cluster at the edge of her triceps, leans forward just enough to make it hurt.
He feels her right ankle hook itself over his left and one brief upward surge of her hips flips him sideways and there is no hand to cradle his head on the way down and he slams it fucking hard, watches bright white semi-consciousness crosswipe itself over his eyes-
"Oh-"
"Get 'im, Quisty!" the cowboy calls from somewhere beyond this bright white haze that picks him up and cradles him in its feather-fluff fingers, leaving him drifting. "Now that's a woman, huh, Almasy?"
"Seifer? Are you ok?"
He blinks her face into vaguely coherent mist above him. "You just broke my fucking head."
He watches this vaguely coherent mist gather itself into a frown. "I'm sure you're fine. Just let me…there's a lot of blood. Hyne."
"No shit," he snarls.
"You might have a concussion, so just let me-"
"Eh, he's fine, Quisty. His head's way too hard for a piece of metal to put a dent in it. You'd need to, like, drop a whole building on it or something."
"Zell, would you just get me a towel from the bathroom, please?"
"Yeah, your nasty hot dog breath isn't helping."
"Seifer, just be quiet. Zell, please go get me a towel."
"Wowee, Quisty! What d'ya' do to him? Is this like some kinda' bondage thing? You know, where you guys knock each other around and you get all tingly and then you tie his penis up with your whip and-"
"It was just an accident, Selphie. Zell! The towel. Irvine, could you-"
"On it, darlin'. Dincht, stop flexin' in the mirror and get the hell back out here."
"Can't find one."
"What do you mean you can't find one? There has to be a towel somewhere in the bathroom."
"Oh yeah, ooopsie. I kinda' decided to treat myself and I did the whole spa shebang- well, it wasn't that shebangy because the headmaster made me put back like half my luggage because he said it was too much to bring along on a mission so all I could do was a hot oil treatment, a face steam, a body wrap and mask- ooh, you should try it Quisty; it's got seaweed and dead sea salt in it and it makes your skin all smooth and soft and sucks out any nasties like if you've got a pimple on your butt or something-"
"Where are the towels, Selphie?"
"Well, you have to use different towels because otherwise your face gets all germy and you break out so I had to use one for the face steam and one for the hot oil treatment because the towel seals in all the nutrients and it's really great for your hair -you should try it sometime, Quisty- and then I used one for the body wrap and-"
"I don't care. We'll just re-use one of them. I just need something to keep pressure on his wound."
"Weeell, I kinda' already took them downstairs because the one was all yucky from the mud and the other-"
"Didn't you get some more from the front desk?"
"They said they're out cause all the soldiers are staying here and stuff and they're booked solid, but no worries, Quisty! They said they'll have plenty more in the morning."
"Selphie, yours was the only room with any towels in it."
"I know! Score, huh?"
"I swear to fucking Hyne if you use Wuss' goddamned man panties on my head I will throw myself off the balcony."
"If you don't stop talking I'll use them as a gag."
"You know you're way better-looking with your mouth shut, Trepe?"
"Zell, if you would-"
"Don't even fucking suggest it."
"Then be quiet. If you'd just hold still, I could get a better look at your head."
"If you hadn't broken it in the first place, you wouldn't have to worry about looking at it-"
"Well, if you hadn't-"
"Make a lovely couple, don't they? I can just see 'em growin' old on a porch together somewhere, tradin' kidney shots and stories about their youth."
"Shut the fuck up, cowboy-"
"Seifer, could you just for one moment be quiet; your rudeness is entirely unwarranted-"
My rudeness is -fuck- are you kidding me-"
"Oooh! You know what we should do? We could paint his fingernails! I have this really, really pretty pink color that's all shiny, and I think it would work really well with his hair and his skin tone. You should try it too, Quisty!"
He surfaces through layers of fog to pry both eyes as wide open as they will go, and just inches from his face is Quistis Trepe's, wreathed in a little flicker of a smile that she coughs to cover up.
"I'll help ya', Selphie."
"Thanks, Zell!"
"The fuck you will, Chicken Wuss!" he snarls.
Quistis presses both hands to his shoulders as he snaps himself upright, one palm to his head, and now that fleeting flicker of a smile becomes a frown pulling tight the corners of her eyes. "Don't sit up so fast. You're still bleeding quite a bit."
He shakes her off, scrapes his boots up underneath him, falls back into her waiting arms as all the fog in his head comes down over his eyes and the starless midnight sky above his head peels itself apart one smoke-shred wisp at a time-
"I told you so," she says in his ear, her fingers resting lightly against his stomach.
-i told you not to do that seifer i told you so i told you so-
I told you so I told you so I told you so- why doesn't she just shove her fucking I told you so up her goddamned ass.
"Ya' know, you'd think that he wouldn't come here, with all the intel about him getting kidnapped and stuff." Zell scratches his head with the tip of one bare finger and slants his head down toward one shoulder, feeling his neck muscles ripple and stretch and give.
"Deling wants to show that he has nothing to be afraid of, that he won't be kept out by a few threats," Quistis tells him distractedly, her eyes on Seifer Almasy's broad bare shoulders as he steps out from beneath the awning of the Timber Hotel. "If he hunkers down in Deling City, it will look as though he's afraid, as though the Timber Owls are something to be concerned about, which is precisely the opposite of what he has been assuring Galbadia." She does not look away from Seifer as he shakes out his coat, as the guy's steel-cable biceps -asshole- flex and roll beneath the skin, and Zell crosses his arms and subtly flexes his own, because hey, Almassy, you're not the only one who's all manly-looking and stuff.
"Uh, Quisty…are you checking Seifer out?"
"What?" She jerks her head around and brings one hand up to nudge her glasses back to the precise center of the bridge of her nose, eyes wide. "No! Of course not. I just want to make sure he's moving all right this morning. He's not exhibiting any signs of a concussion, but he did lose quite a bit of blood last night."
"Uh huh." He sweeps one arm up over his head, bends it at the elbow, stretches his hand down toward his shoulder blades. "So, uh…Quisty…could I get some advice?"
"About what, Zell?" she asks, watching the procession of blue-uniformed soldiers clank clank clanking their way toward the hotel, Deling in their midst. The stinging glass-shard rain slaps itself down into his eyes and drips itself in rivulets off their armor, and still they march on, on, rifles at shoulder arms, the Presidential Guard murmuring ceaselessly into headsets that pop and crackle and hiss at their ears.
"Like, there's kinda' this girl, and you're kinda' a girl, so I was wondering if you maybe had any tips on how to get women…uh…not like you're a lesbian or anything, that's not what I'm trying to say-"
"Zell. It's all right. I know what you meant." She smiles so friggin' kindly at him, and man, what's a girl like this doing at Garden, learning how to take people apart with her hands and her whip and her gun; what's a smile like this doing on a battlefield, smeared in mud and blood and all the little pieces of her friends that are not coming home-
She looks like a mother, when she smiles like that. He can let go what little control he has over his mouth, let everything break and tumble and rush free, and she will not judge him, she will not laugh or turn away or tell him he is stupid: she will listen; she will smile her kind mother's smile and gently tousle all the spikes of his hair and he will understand how to make Ellone love him, just like that-
"Zell?" she prompts him softly.
"Uh, yeah. So, like I said, there's this girl…and-"
"Oooh! A girl? Who is it?" Selphie calls brightly. "Hey, can I borrow this? It's raining. Thanks!" She snatches Seifer's coat from his hands before he can even react and flips it up over her head, tenting it above her hair, and now she skips out toward them in little uneven stutters of steps, boots squelching in the mud.
"The fuck? Is she high?"
"Nope! I'm 100% natural, baby!" Selphie sing-songs. She pokes Zell's shoulder hard, lets her finger sink a good half inch into his bicep before pulling it back. "I think you're gonna' be fine, Zell! You're really cute, you know?"
He pulls his back up a little straighter, squares his shoulders. "Really?"
"Yeah! Your hair's stupid, though."
"What?"
"I said YOUR HAIR'S STUPID."
"I heard you."
"Hey! We could give you a makeover! I could cut your hair and then Quisty could style it- let's do it tonight, guys!"
Quistis stifles a little laugh with the palm of her hand, peels it slowly away when she has completely composed her face once again. "My styling techniques leave something to be desired, I'm afraid. Zell's hair would hardly turn out any better than what he's managed on his own."
"So, what? You're sayin' you don't like my hair, either, Quisty?"
"It's just a little…pointy, Zell. But your hair isn't what matters, of course; she should like you for who you are, not for what you look like."
"Wuss doesn't have any 'inner beauty', Trepe, just like he doesn't have any outer beauty, so you can stop feeding him that shitty chick flick self-help advice."
"I see you're feeling fine, if you are capable of your usual foul-mouthed stream of insults."
"I think my head's ok, although to be on the safe side, you should probably give it a kiss. I think you know which head I'm referring to, but just in case-"
"As I said earlier this morning," she interrupts him loudly, and now Zell watches Seifer fold both arms with a smirk, and he sidles up next to him to pop a short hard jab into his ribs, jerks one hand down to slap aside the return shot fired back at his own ribs, and she continues on: "We'll split into two teams. Squall, Seifer and Irvine will search the woods, see if they can find anything useful. The Timber Owls might have a bunker or something similar out there; it's the best place to hide a resistance group. Zell, myself and Selphie will remain in town, where we'll interview residents, see if we can find anything suspicious, who might be aiding them, hiding them, etc. I want the three of you to have an extra GF, just in case." She looks from Seifer to Irvine back to Squall, lingering just behind the group, face expressionless, shoulders hunched just slightly, one thumb hooked through the loop of his pants. "Who wants it?"
"Guardian Forces are for pussies," Seifer declares loudly. "Give it to Pubes."
She frowns at Seifer, lets her gaze slip cautiously over his shoulder to skim itself back to Squall.
"I'll take it," he says quietly.
"All right."
Zell bounces from one foot to the other as the soldiers clank clank clank past shuttered shops and tightly-closed residences, slaps at both arms to keep all his blood flowing: gotta' keep moving, if you wanna' stay loose. He got his ass handed to him in a fight one time by his instructor, because he didn't keep his muscles warm and his joints loose, and ok, so he got his ass handed to him every time he fought that particular instructor, but it wasn't his fault; the guy was really good, and just friggin' watch anyone else try and beat him- they wouldn't last half as long as-
There is an explosion.
It's kinda' a funny thing, this explosion.
Because it hits him- he knows it lifts him up onto his toes and flings him sprawling backward, clipping Seifer's shoulder, grazing Irvine's ribs- but he doesn't really feel it, not at first.
He's not even exactly sure what just hit him.
He's seen this happen before. In battle, there's this…pause between the hit and the reaction, this infinitesimal moment before your body realizes that it is supposed to be down, that it can no longer go, and sometimes this pause gives someone just enough time to fire a last shot, to thrust a final riposte, but he has no time for any of this because there is no one to fight; where the hell is the enemy even at, and now he watches mud spray out from either side of him, go spiraling away past his outstretched fingertips-
They hit hard and fast, and somebody from Galbadia is playing for their team, because they know the exact layout of the formation, precisely where to strike to break apart Deling's shining blue-armored shield.
They drop the guards to either side of Deling first, move outward from there, pick off those who panic and break away, who fire blindly back at these assailants that cannot be seen.
She is holding Squall's hands, when the first shot is fired.
Transference of a GF is an intimate thing, a brief melding of minds, a melting together of thoughts and feelings and sensations, and she clutches his fingers just a little tighter, just a little longer than she needs to, spends her time feeding Shiva into his brain-
And then behind her there is the loud bone-crack of this first fired shot, a thud, a splash, cold mud-splatter across her back and over her shoulders-
Squall tucks himself into a roll that carries him neatly to his feet beneath the awning, and now Lionheart gleams in the rain, winks back little silver needles of reflected downpour that slit her eyes, they are that bright-
Her pivot and the drawing of her weapon are a single motion, and now she crouches, lets Save the Queen unravel in the mud beneath her boots-
Seifer and Irvine haul Zell Dincht's limply unresponsive body back toward the hotel, Selphie in front of them, Shield spinning itself in disentangling blush-rose ribbons from her fingers, and oh, Hyne, not him; he is so nice; he is the type of boy her mother would want her to bring home to dinner, if she had a mother who cared-
Quezacotl unfurls in the sky above her.
Steel-jacket rainfall hisses around and past and through him, and he spreads his wings wider, extends them out as far as they will go, from tip to tip, sheltering Selphie and Irvine and Seifer and Zell underneath him, and one quick glance over her shoulder shows her Squall's face, tight in concentration, and now another soldier falls and another gun echoes its harmless rattling rounds into the sky, arcing them up into the thunderclouds like birds taking wing-
"Get to Deling," she orders. "Protect him however you can."
"Fuck Deling," Seifer hisses, reaching the awning as Squall sprints out from underneath it, and very gently he lays Zell down on the sidewalk and readjusts his slick red hand on Zell's neck, and oh Hyne, there's so much blood-
"Fucking hit him with something, Trepe. You have to have a Curaga or something."
Irvine crouches on Zell's left, Selphie beside him, and Seifer spreads his hand out wider, flattens his palm down harder-
"I said give him something." His voice is a thin little strained-tight wire of a thing, and there is so much raw rasping pain in this sharp plea that she stretches out one hand for his forearm, lays her fingers down over his bare blonde-frosted skin.
"Seifer…there's a major artery in the neck, right where he was hit, and even a Curaga isn't going to-"
"I don't fucking care where he was hit. Fix him!"
He feels Selphie slip her hand into his own, and these cold-numb fingers and her gentle little squeeze barely even register, because Dincht is so pale and Seifer…the guy just comes unraveled, starts screaming right in poor Quisty's face, and he wants to take him by the shoulder, pull him back, shake him outta' this misdirected rage, but he can't move his hands and he can't feel his fingers and his rifle pools uselessly across his numb wooden legs, and Hyne-dammit, don't let this be it for him, Hyne, please, oh fucking please-
"I said goddamned fix him."
He keeps his hand on Wuss' neck and his face right in Quistis' personal little fucking bubble that is so goddamned important to her, and he ignores how cold the asshole feels, the way he is so goddamned still when he can never fucking hold still-
"I don't have anything stocked. Fucking do something, Quistis."
She's looking at him like he is something to be fucking pitied, like he doesn't know the odds, like he doesn't feel the blood pumping through his fingers or see the chalk-corpse pallor that comes to steal away all the color from his friend's cheeks, but just fucking try, please, please- he can't just sit here-
He says it out loud, and his voice cracks the word and spits it back up in pieces, and for once he doesn't give a shit, because all this blood pumping out beneath his fingers is still going, spurting up between his knuckles, and he has seen this sort of death lots of times before, watched guys empty themselves out across the ground beneath his boots, stepped right over them and kept going -what the fuck else are you supposed to do- but not fucking Zell. Not this one asshole- that's all he's asking, Hyne, if you're out there, not this one-
"Please."
She slithers forward out of her crouch just a few steps, just three tentative little movements, and he reaches out his other hand, the one that is not drenched in red, the one that is not so slippery he can just barely hold it in place, and he grabs her wrist and squeezes hard enough for her to feel the pressure all the way down to the bone, and don't fucking look at him like that, just fucking help him-
"Fucking please, Quistis."
He watches her take a little steadying breath, and he keeps his hand on her wrist, pressing, bearing down until this steadying little breath she takes stabilizes him just slightly as well, and now her hand slides over his and she whips her head up to face the others behind him, and this is the steel-balls Trepe he needs, the one who's going to take care of shit, who's going to fix all the problems others have caused-
"Irvine, provide cover. Selphie, I want you on mag-support. We're not leaving Squall all on his own out there. All of us crowding Zell is not helping him, and it's not going to save him. You do your jobs, take care of the mission, and leave this to me."
They both nod solemnly, and he marvels at how fucking solid her voice is, how fucking sure, because her hand shows the lie and he pulls his wrist away at last, because he doesn't want to feel it.
She flicks her eyes up to his as the others scurry off to take up their positions. "Can you find a pulse?"
He shuts his eyes and gropes around on the bastard's neck and what he is rewarded with is a faint little kick beneath the pads of his fingertips, and for just a moment he can't tell her about it; all he can do is fucking choke a little and remember the first time he realized Matron didn't want him, and the way he cried like a baby, and how similar that moment felt to what is going on inside of him right now.
"Yeah. It's there. Barely."
"All right. I don't have any potions, but I'm going to administer a Life and see if we can't jump-start him just a little. Keep pressure on that wound."
"Why not a Full-Life?" he squeezes out.
"Because it's too dangerous to administer that on someone whose heart is still beating. It's intended as an absolute last resort on the battlefield, to get someone's heart pumping again when you don't have the proper medical equipment. I could kill him, hitting him with one of those while his heart is still beating."
She lays her fingers gently across Zell's forehead. "This is going to hurt, but I need you to keep your hand on him, ok? We need to keep pressure on that wound."
"Fine." He grits his teeth and she shuts her eyes and now it is like someone hooks him directly into a power line, shoots its hot white current through all his limbs down to the very tips of his toes where they spasm inside his boots, and fuck, fuck- Wuss owes him a goddamned hand job or something-
"How is it now?" she asks, taking her hand off Zell's forehead and pressing it to her own, swaying just slightly.
He flicks his fingers up to where Wuss' jaw angles down into his neck, and shit shit shit there is nothing-
She sees this answer in his face and sets her hand back down on Zell's forehead, and from behind her glasses, her eyes regard him very steadily. "You need to let go now, Seifer. The spell's not going to enter you directly, but since you're not the caster you aren't grounded, and getting hit with that much voltage could potentially stop your own heart."
He can't let go; the guy's fucking draining himself here; the second he lets up on this hole in the side of Wuss' neck the rest of the asshole's life will leak itself down onto the pavement, stain the knees of his pants and the toes of his boots, and she can break his fucking fingers if she wants, but see if she gets him to fucking let go.
"No," he snaps.
"Seifer."
"Don't fucking argue with me. Just do it. He needs pressure on the wound; you can't do it and cast the spell at the same time. Do it."
Something flickers briefly in her eyes and plays itself even more briefly across her face, and then her fingers flare blue and his world flares white and he grinds his teeth down until the fuckers creak warningly, and just hold on, goddammit, just hold on-
The blue sucks itself back into her fingers and the white retreats slowly, fucking slowly to just the edges of his sputtering cotton-cloud vision, all fuzzy around the corners, and now something twitches beneath his hand but don't get your hopes up yet, asshole- everything about him is twitching and jangling and flinching, and maybe it's just his own hand-
No-
No-
A real live fucking heartbeat jumps beneath his fingers and something clenched inside his chest unravels from around his heart and he could fucking kiss her; he could fucking kiss Wuss-
"His heart's going!"
"All right, good," she says tightly. "We need to stop the bleeding now; if we can't do that, it doesn't matter if he has a pulse- he won't much longer."
It's gone.
It's fucking gone it was just there-
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck it stopped-"
"Seifer, calm down."
"Don't fucking tell me-"
"I said calm down," she says coldly, pressing the point of her thumb hard into the bones of his forearm, bearing down until he winces. "You are not helping him. I need you to take a deep breath. I need you to not panic, Seifer, ok? I'm going to take his radial pulse; he's lost enough blood that it may just be difficult to get a pulse on him." She takes Zell's hand gently in her own, presses her pointer and her middle fingers just beneath his wrist. "All right. I'm going to try something. I'm going to take your spot, all right? I'll slip my hand beneath yours; when I do, let go and step back."
"What are you going to do?"
"Just do it, Seifer. He doesn't have time for you to argue with me."
He stays just long enough for her face to soften, for her to slip that pale fucking hand from her own and lay her fingers down across his shoulder. "Just trust me, Seifer. I won't let him die."
Fuck it.
She slides her hand carefully beneath his own, applies her own pressure, and now he lets go of his friend for the first time in minutes and shifts over just enough to give her room, feels the hard pavement dig into his knees and the cold little shit-splatters of mud in his mouth-
The blue haloes out from beneath her fingers again, spills itself all across Zell Dincht's eerily motionless body, and he shuts his eyes as tight as they will go, squeezes down until nothing leaks out from beneath his lashes.
Two of the bodyguards flanking Deling do not go down.
They turn on the others, use the chaos to spray down a layer of hot lead, and from above, around, wherever it is these shots are coming from, more of these hot lead layers rain themselves down, gouge little superficial holes in Selphie's Protect and Squall's Shield-
He fires from the hip, watches the first of these two bodyguards spit up little pieces of things that are supposed to still be inside him, works the bolt, fires again.
Squall seizes Deling's arm. The action disrupts his Shield; Selphie casts another on him and above them Quezacotl spins himself sideways, spirals downward, is shredded into mist.
Squall loses himself and Deling amidst the remainder of the scattered Galbadian soldiers, pulls the man in tight to him, yanks him along by the collar; they are picked up by this wave of scattered Galbadian soldiers and swept along on its tide, and now Selphie comes hurtling after them, casting, reinforcing her Protect and the Shield that shimmers faintly into existence around Squall and Deling, who flails his arms and nearly takes out the Hyne-damned thing all over again.
"Get to the hotel!" Squall yells. "We have to get out of the open."
Retreating to the hotel will take him past Seifer on his knees and Zell on his back, Quistis crouched beside them both, and man he can't think about that right now; Quisty will patch him right up; she will not let him die; he will not bury a friend, not today, Hyne-dammit, not now-
"Go!" Squall yells, and he slings his gun across his shoulder and pulls his hat down low over his eyes and he runs.
He takes a shuddering breath that sucks in rain and mud and this faint metal aftertaste he's pretty sure is a fine wet mist of blood, and he keeps both hands fisted on the pavement, staring blankly down at Trepe's white hands and Zell's even whiter cheeks-
Do not let him die; do not let him fucking die- she has always been fixing things, putting them back together, mopping up other people's messes- do not let him goddamned die, Quistis-
"Get him into the hotel," she says weakly, pressing her hands down into the pavement beneath him. "Carefully. I think you can move him."
He blinks at her through layers of rainfall that come down and down and down. "What?"
"I used a mixture of Curaga and Full-Life and I've managed to establish a strong pulse, and the Curgaga sealed up his wound; he's no longer bleeding, for the moment. I'm still a little concerned about using that Full-Life, however; his heart may not have actually stopped at all earlier- like I said, sometimes it can be hard to find a pulse on someone who's lost a lot of blood and consequently has a weak heart rate. That's the problem with medical attention administered on the battlefield-you don't have the liberty of taking the time to-"
He doesn't give a shit about all her look-how-much-fucking-smarter-I-am-than-you medical jargon-
What she is saying is Zell is going to be ok; his goddamned heart is beating; he is still hanging on- he is still fucking hanging on-
He can't even-
How the fuck is he even supposed to thank her for this-
He doesn't have the goddamned words.
"-I'm not promising anything, and he'll need to be monitored carefully, and we need to get him out of here as soon as it's safe, to a facility more equipped to deal with-"
He lunges forward, and now his hands crush her shoulders and pull her into him and she shuts abruptly up, her forehead impacting his chest, and for one brief moment he holds her as hard as he can.
"Um," she says, and he shifts back just far enough to slide his hands from her shoulders to the sides of her face, cradles her soft white-wax cheeks in his palms.
He shuts his eyes and his lips find her forehead almost brutally, and for one more moment he keeps them pressed there, breathing in her soft vanilla-soap skin and her matching shampoo, and if they could just fucking stay like this-
But Wuss needs him.
Wuss needs him and the cowboy might too, out there in the middle of all that bloodshed, and you don't leave your posse behind for a women, even this woman.
"You're a goddamned genius, Trepe."
His lips are soft.
Something inside of her shifts and trembles and shakes itself loose.
-it's just a bird trepe what are you crying about look stop stop ok fuck don't cry here you can have mine if it means that much to you i said stop crying-
For just a moment, she is frozen.
Here under the awning, the fight has not yet reached her, and for this infinitesimal moment she can simply stay like this, not understanding, just kneeling dumbly blinking with her palms pressed flat to the pavement underneath her, and now as she watches he takes Zell gently underneath the arms, jerks his head to someone she can't see-
And through wet gray mist Irvine materializes, rifle over his shoulder, duster soaked, and together they lift Zell carefully off the street and now comes Selphie, still encapsulated in her softly shimmering globe of Protect, and she holds the hotel door open for them, shaking rain from her hair-
Squall kneels beside her.
Thin little rivulets of water streak his cheeks, leak from underneath his eyes like tears that run themselves down his face and into his mouth, and she watches his free hand lift in a little flick of a wave, motioning to the stream of soldiers that pour themselves past, Deling sheltered once more in their midst.
"I think we're all right for now, with Deling inside," he says quietly. "They don't have the numbers to engage us- if they did, we'd be able to see them. We probably took out a significant number of their force yesterday." He pauses. "Quistis?"
-oh fuck off you assholes who cares if she gave a shit about some stupid bird you're probably just jealous because she's smarter than all three of you put together and she'll be running garden someday yeah well i don't really care if you fail me this test is fucking stupid anyway-
"Quistis?"
They are only little fragments, pieces of images and thoughts and words that do not slot themselves together into a whole, and she doesn't understand; it is Seifer's voice in her ear and his hand on her arm and his snarling wrath aimed off into dry wind-swept hills of sand, but when did this happen-
It doesn't matter and nothing has to make sense, all she has to do is move: she picks up her whip from the mud and blood-smeared pavement underneath her and stands, the kinks in her legs buckling her knees just a little, and beside her Squall rises as well, and now in the distance the chattering machine gun cries die out, fade back into the drumming drumming rain, and she coils up her weapon as she goes, follows him back into the overcrowded lobby where too many faces tip themselves toward her, look up with hope in their eyes.
She has seen these too many faces tipping themselves toward her before, looking for guidance, for explanation, for a path to take, and she lifts her shoulders up and up and up beneath this burden, until they do not bend or bow or shake.
"I need you and you and you," she orders, pointing. "Irvine and Seifer, stay with Zell. Selphie, you're with us. I want you to pursue and capture. Do not engage the enemy unless absolutely necessary. Do not kill them; use nonlethal force unless you have no other choice. Let's go."
"Zone?" someone whispers beside him in the dark.
He watched them take Watts out like garbage, and throw him away in a ditch.
He watched them take Watts out like garbage and throw him away in a ditch.
Is that fair? Is it fair that Malena is never going to have his children and his mother is never going to bury her son because they tossed him like trash into sticky wet leaves crusted in mold and bird shit; is it fair that in coming months, until they have all flown south for a warmer home, these birds will shit on him as they have shit on these leaves- is it fucking fair-
How many times tonight, lying in this dark, with the sounds of breathing all around him, with the creaks and pops and bone-snaps of an old house settling, has he tongued back a little adhesive clot-heap of tears, and is this fair either-
His father once told him that nothing about freedom is fair: you fight inch by screaming painful inch for it, push forward until you have nowhere else to go, take your victories bloody with a side of dead friend, and when you have at last won this freedom, you stand with your broken bones and your ripped-off nails and all the little holes in your heart where each new bloody victory has suctioned free another little piece of you, and you watch someone else come to take it all away again.
But he's only eighteen.
He is supposed to be at home, playing shoot 'em ups on his parents' 40" screen, making shyly subtle moves on his girlfriend, losing parts of his innocent that have nothing to do with friends blown to pieces while his parents sleep on blissfully unaware above his head.
But two soldiers raped his girlfriend until she bled out across the pristine white carpet of her family's pretty little cottage-style home, and it doesn't matter that their commanding officer shot them on sight for such unprofessional conduct, she is still gone, she is still not here, and his parents' 40" screen has been gone a long time now, sold for the funds to fight this war, and his parents themselves are long gone as well.
And Watts…
Watts was all he had left.
Watts smothered his cries when they marched his father out into the streets and executed him on his knees in the rain; he pulled him back into the shadows where they could not see, where they would not come for him next, and he taught him when to run and how to fight, and they just threw him away.
He was not trash.
He was a friend.
He knew exactly how to time a joke, and when to shut his mouth; he played soccer; he made the best apple pie Zone ever tasted.
Those bodies Galbadia just chucks out like they are nothing- they had people who loved them; they took up hobbies and they sucked at bowling and they wanted children who would grow up in peace, who would not have to fight.
"Zone?"
Watts…Watts, man…he promises…Hyne, it's just so hard, you know? He doesn't want to crouch in basements like a hobo; he doesn't want to grab sleep where he can, to be shaken awake by a high school junior with a gun in his hands and tears on his cheeks, because he lost another friend, because he took another life.
He is tired of taking lives and he is tired of having them taken from him and he is just exhausted;why can't he give up;why does it have to be him-
Why does giving up have to be so easy? You can just relax into it, melt, let it carry you off, sweep you along; you will never have to worry about your next meal, the way you will have to choke it down between firefights in the woods, how it sticks in your throat on its way down, the way it tastes like sawdust, stripped of flavor, pared down to nothing.
"Zone…it's ok. We'll get 'em."
His father also once told him that he would rather live free, or die trying. Freedom is a choice, he said: you can keep it or you can sit on your ass and watch it drain away; hold it close or let it go.
He will make this choice over and over, every night when he lies down to sleep with one less friend among them; he will ask whether it is worth it; how many times can he mourn; how many ways can he lose.
He will ask himself these questions and he will present himself with this choice every day, every night, and it will never get any easier, and he will never have any other answer.
You just go forward, Watts used to tell him. You just keep pushing, ok?
All you can do is try.