When Raijin woke just a few hours before, in the night, he was himself again. There was no one in the room: not the first girl, not the second, and, blessedly, not the man in red. Raijin had never been so grateful for anything in his life.
He ached. He knew there were more parts of him broken than there had ever been before and that was saying something, because he'd been a consummate trainer as a cadet and he'd trained with Fujin and Seifer, neither of whom was particularly careful or given to worrying about accidentally injuring a training partner.
He could take a lot of damage. He reminded himself of this. It was odd to have to remind himself, but his brain wasn't right. It felt like there was broken glass in it.
Painfully, he rolled onto his side. He moved his bottom leg until it dropped pathetically to the floor. The second leg followed. He heaved himself off the bed and let his body hit the cold marble underneath, ignoring the shock and pain of it, then lifted himself onto his elbows. His legs were entirely useless - the knees and ankles were broken spots of pain - so it fell to his arms to drag him to a corner where he collapsed, panting with exertion.
It made no sense to have gotten out of bed in the first place. He could see that after a few minutes. But he couldn't just give up. In the first place, he didn't want to return to the torture session. In the second place, he was DC. The DC didn't give up.
Raijin had a curious verbal tic. It made people think he was stupid. Maybe he was stupid, come to think of it. It had never occurred to him that he might be smart. But his speech patterns weren't real evidence of his stupidity. At the end of nearly every sentence he would confer with his audience. 'Ya know?'Did they know? Did they want to? And wouldn't it be nice for them if, just once, they got the impression that someone cared if they knew, and cared about their opinion?
That was Raijin. A very comforting way of speech. Always checking in. Few people at Garden ever seemed to check in with anyone else. He'd followed his sister there – Garden had never been a special dream of his – and on arrival he'd been struck by the beauty of the place, the bustle, the rules and forms and psych evals. And the loneliness. Few people at Balamb Garden bothered to listen to anything beyond orders from above. Certainly they didn't bother to really listen to each other. Many connected in superficial ways: through clubs nobody had much interest in, through sharing the same books at the library, through making untouchable idols of their Instructors, through training exercises and cavern tests. But then they promptly forgot key details about each other, or subsumed themselves in their own drive and ambition (you couldn't pass the SeeD test if you weren't wholly committed to passing; everyone knew that), and on second meeting it was as though you were a stranger.
GFs played a part. But Raijin also put it down to mercenary selfishness, mercenary methods of defense. They were keeping others out, keeping others separate. Because naturally people could die on the SeeD test, or on a mission: every year in the spring there was a memorial ceremony where the names were read out over the loudspeaker. A list of dead classmates as you fidgeted in the quad, as someone next to you whispered about the upcoming Garden festival. And this wasn't the only way you could lose people at Garden. If someone didn't pass their test or Cid or the Shumi didn't like them, they'd eventually be cast out. So there was a curious sense pervading much of Garden that suggested that the more independent you were, the more focused on yourself and less on interpersonal nonsense, the luckier and stronger you naturally had to be.
But Raijin didn't need to prove himself strong. His strength had always been evident. At age nine, he'd already been five feet tall. Now, at nineteen, he was a cool seven. He was broad, too. Nobody had ever assumed he was weak. If anything, he was usually considered a bruiser, a thug, through no fault of his own. People looked up at him with a kind of anticipatory dread, seeing a looming, massive creature, skin and eyes oddly dark, teeth oddly white, the image of some long-ago Estharian plainsman who'd worshipped storms and raided shores far and wide. He stood out. Powerful. Threatening. But he didn't want to seem that way.
So he masked it with concern. And the concern wasn't totally insincere; Raijin really valued people. Seifer and Fujin were top of the list. But other people, too. Raijin didn't junction much because he'd always had enough power in his arms to come off fine during training. And he'd never put himself down for SeeD because he simply hadn't wanted to; he was at Garden to look after his sister; that was all. So GFs had never interfered with his measure of his fellow cadets.
He'd never cared much for Garden as an institution, but its people had always seemed worthwhile and good to him. Squall, not so great in the personality department (but then who was, at B-Garden?), but who tried with every fiber of his being at any task you set him to. Instructor Trepe, who seemed so unfairly lonely for someone so poised and talented and beautiful. Zell Dincht, who brought a much-needed vibrancy and friendliness to Garden, who was immune to the self-interest others carried around with them as closely as they did their weapons. Xu, cruel when she didn't need to be and wasn't trying to be, and yet still not half as cruel as she thought she was. Even weird Nida, who'd helped Raijin conjugate old Centran verbs when Fujin and Seifer had been leaping ahead, intuiting the language with uncommon brilliance, and far too absorbed in their own work to care that Raijin couldn't keep up.
Those two…they were. Well. In just the same way Raijin masked his power, they masked parts of themselves. Fujin barked out every word in terse command. It made people uneasy and scared. It was supposed to. Those were the speech patterns of the plains near Esthar, though of course nobody used them anymore because of course the plains had been razed to bits by Adel and her knight. Fujin and Raijin had learned how to talk like that in FH, on their exiled mother's knee, and Fujin put it to good use keeping people at bay, making sure they didn't think to cross her.
And Seifer? Seifer spoke like a thug. Seifer walked like a thug, and slicked back his hair like one, and sneered like one. Seifer was Garden bred; he didn't seem to have ever learned anything at anybody's knee. He'd had to snatch everything for himself. And he'd snatched up books and sagas and old films, poetry and dead languages and dreams: everything. Seifer was hungry for everything. And if you looked at him – really looked – you could see it.
Seifer wasn't as broad as his coat made him out to be; it was just hard to make that out under the grandiose body language, the clothing. The general domineering demeanor. And he had a pale cast to him, an ashen light underneath his coloring, that few people really noted. Giggling young cadets would whisper that maybe he was golden all over; he always seemed to give the impression - by his own design - that health and strength were vibrating right out of him naturally, effortlessly. Really, though, he was the product of hours spent training and studying and poring over rulebooks, so that he'd always been, in his own way, sun-starved and stunted and starving for something Garden couldn't offer him. He covered this up with his bullying, his lazy hooligan speech. He had a good vocabulary when you caught him off guard (no one who read as much old-timey knight language as he did could fail to learn a few words), and an inner boyish need to be praised, but on the outside, he never showed it. He didn't think anything would ever be handed to him, not even if he'd asked politely or beautifully. So he talked like a brute, a gangster, someone who could simply take. Because he would, and it would have been dishonorable to hide that.
In this, there was a kind of honesty to him. As there was with Fujin revealing her lost history, and Raijin revealing his affection for others. The DC were fake when it came to their speech and weird lists and gestures; they were teenage in the worst sense, occasionally cruel and often sardonic and demanding attention at every turn, never stooping to do things the way anyone else did, coating themselves in imitation cool. But even with that. They were real where it counted. Even their masks were designed to show you something true.
They wanted to be true to themselves in some strange way. Not to conform to the great Garden lie, the layer of artifice and superficiality. Instead to be honest, and follow their dreams. Nothing could be nobler.
And someone who was true to himself didn't just curl up and die in a corner, waiting for his torturers to return.
Raijin breathed in. Then out. His breath rattled in his large chest. That wasn't a good sign, but it wasn't the worst, either. His body had always been the most useful thing about him. Resilient. This was why it had taken an attack on his mind to break him. He'd never developed his mind in the same way. He saw the silliness of that now. Fujin and Seifer had always taken care of the plans (Fujin) and the decision-making (Seifer). And he'd always been the muscle. But now his muscle was worth nothing. Every part of him that might put that muscle to use was broken.
He would need to think like his friends to get out of this. So that he could rescue his friends. The girl – the kind one, not the sorceress – had told him that Fujin was out and safe. But safe was a thing Fujin hated being, especially if the rest of the Disciplinary Committee wasn't safe. So Raijin knew with certainty that she'd be back here, with all the force and common sense of a hurricane, to get him out. And to get Seifer out.
This hit Raijin worse than the red man's torture had. Not that she would be back. But that Seifer was… Where was Seifer? He'd been… Raijin's mind recoiled. He couldn't think of it. He couldn't. The pain he received, thinking Seifer was lost, was worse this time than it had been when Seifer had been under Ultimecia's control. Because then some particle of Seifer had remained, some desperate glint in the too-bright eyes.
But now, when he'd last seen Seifer's eyes, they'd been very, very different.
Raijin choked past the thought. He had to be ready for when Fujin came. And he had to figure out what had become of Seifer. He steeled himself, began to plan, to really think. But then someone came in and shrieked to find him gone from the bed and searched the room in a frenzy. She found him huddled in the corner. Then, pity softening her face, she approached him carefully, kindly. Raijin was still reeling from the false kindness of the man in red and didn't quite want to trust her. But then he had no choice.
"My friend…?" he found himself saying, once he was able to summon up a voice. It came out like a croak. Not comforting at all, but broken and scared.
"The Knight. I…I saw him," Renata whispered back. "In his cell. Months ago, before... Well. I tried to help. He didn't want me to; he said to get you out. So - well. You know what happened after that. I'm sorry."
Raijin hadn't wanted to hear that. His weak mind shuddered at it. But then he was able to gather himself up somewhat, to put all those jagged shards of his mind in some kind of order, and he said, with more confidence than he felt, "We'll get him back. Me and Fujin. She'll be back."
Renata didn't seem convinced by this argument. She only said, "Then we have to make sure you don't break before she comes. Before she and Garden come."
"I…was thinking," Raijin said, somewhat faint and unsure. "I was thinking that I could. I could plan this. I could be smart about it. Maybe." Pain radiated from every corner of his body. He ignored it. "…I'm not smart. But maybe."
Renata nodded. She looked relieved. She said. "They're coming for you soon. And they want to know—"
"Sorceresses," Raijin said. "They want to know about sorceresses. I could give them—"
"The new one," Renata urged. "That's the one they really care about."
Rinoa. Raijin had only really met her once, during that summer Seifer had spent on the Galbadian continent. She'd had a quick way of jostling Seifer, making him snap back, retort, until they fell to laughing and showing off with each other. Raijin had never seen Seifer like that before. Partnered. He'd also never seen Seifer so happy. Or, for that matter, Squall Leonhart, later on. Or for that matter even Fujin, who'd been recovering from some heartbreak that summer, and whom Rinoa Heartilly had listened to patiently, treated like a person, refused to be disarmed and put off by.
Rinoa was absolutely not the kind of person the DC generally liked. She was rich and spoiled, and she saw right through masks and then preferred to show you that she'd seen through them. She didn't let you stay comfortable. Her own insight sometimes meant more to her than your defense. They should have hated this. They hadn't. Rinoa had been selfish and prodding, to be sure. But she'd also left them each feeling, wonderfully, miraculously, like maybe the thing they were each trying so desperately to hide wasn't so bad after all. Because after she saw through you, she just kind of went with it. Sure, she kept poking. That was her way, to be a little annoying, a little needling. But for the most part she had her dreams – Timber, defeating Galbadia, and so on. And so if you were determined to be a little foolish, a little brutish, she'd make fun of you for it, but she'd understand. She understood other people as people with their own goals and needs. Of course she did: she had big goals and dreams herself.
Raijin had liked her. And it was really the DC's fault, in a way, that she was marked as she was. A sorceress now. So something in Raijin rebelled at betraying her. It was one thing to betray Garden, to use Galbadia, to attack old and cruel Esthar that had destroyed the plains, to screw over a bad system. The DC hated bad systems. With youthful cynicism, they'd spent hours between classes dissecting the evils of the world, politicians, institutional cruelty, and dreaming of how to destroy it all, consumed by romantic anarchy. You owed nothing to a system, and it was the highest kind of nobility to despise a sick one.
But Rinoa was a person. Raijin had a hard time betraying people. People meant something. Even the ones who could do nothing for you but annoy you. They had worth.
"No," Raijin told Renata tightly. "I—I won't. Say anything. Not about her."
But then what to say? Who to throw to the man in red while he waited for his rescue, while he tried to collect information on Seifer and this—this Gallery? Raijin didn't want to throw anyone in the man's sights. No one. He would've taken the hit himself, if it had been only his life on the line and not the whole DC's.
But he needed to buy time, to plan his escape so that he could find them again and make sure they were safe, Fujin and Seifer both. So he would need to become complacent, accepting, broken.
And the man in red wanted to break him not to get at him, but to procure - well. What else? A sorceress.
Raijin's least favorite sorceress was Ultimecia. But he knew very little about her; had never seen her, as Seifer had. And for all he knew it could be dangerous to share the knowledge of her. She was a kind of indiscernible evil that poisoned everything it touched. Something told him the man in red already had that in spades. He didn't need access to more.
Behind Renata, the door opened. Raijin's mind recoiled at it. But he shoved the fear away. He recalled, with perfect clarity, a moment in which he'd been just as terrified as he was right now. Deling City. The sickest system of all. All around them people celebrating it, a grand parade. And then: the sense that his world had been upended, because Seifer had been at the center of it. Seifer. Looking, to Raijin's eyes, for the first time golden, whole, not unfulfilled. He and Fujin hadn't known what to make of it. They'd stayed long enough to make sure he was alright. Then they'd returned to Garden, knowing they would be sanctioned or maybe expelled for attending the parade in the first place instead of coming right back as ordered, and they'd helped evacuate, because it was the least they could do for all those individual Garden people, those valuable personalities who meant so much to Raijin.
And then they'd abandoned the system. Inhuman, impersonal Garden meant nothing compared to human, brilliant, hungry Seifer. Nothing. Only of course they'd missed a huge hint, that day at the parade. Because Seifer hadn't been up there aline. There had been a false creature standing next to him. A mother who'd tossed her son up to Ultimecia's hands. The person who should have taken Seifer onto her knee and guided him, but who'd instead thrown on him rules and forms and psych evals and left him to his hunger.
Edea. The most untrue being Raijin could think of. The pang in his heart at the thought that he was tossing a person into the hands of the man in red was nothing compared to the mistrust and fear he felt when he thought of her, her black nails digging into Seifer's arm, her cold eye on all the DC as she'd made her orders known, the way her perfect mouth had opened to hurl abuse at a boy she should have cherished.
Raijin said, "Do you know? She wears a mask. Kramer. The sorceress Edea."
Renata stared at him worriedly. Turned to look over her shoulder at the man in red.
He only frowned. He said, "My friend, you're awake. And talking. That's wonderful. But we've been over this. Edea, Edea. It's boring, all this talk of Edea. Edea isn't a sorceress anymore, you know."
Raijin played dumb. He was good at dumb. He was dumb, a little. He said, "Isn't she?" with a kind of false wonder in his tone. And then he said, "But she can still take on the sorceress power, ya know? And…and she and Cid. They're in charge."
"Yes, yes, of Garden," said the man in red, waving a hand disinterestedly.
"Of the whole thing," Raijin told him. "The whole system. The SeeDs. No other sorceress ever had SeeDs."
Because that was the kicker, wasn't it? She hadn't just been fighting the SeeDs. She'd been one of their founders, too. Raijin didn't trust that. The official line was that she'd been a victim of Ultimecia's manipulations. But she'd done just as much wrong as Seifer, and then gotten off, tucked herself into the Garden fold, back into that sick system she'd created, and left her son – Raijin's friend – shadow-eyed and thin on a pier.
"You know," Raijin said, entirely honest. "I'm starting to think you were right about. Sometimes I think she set it up. Sometimes I think she knew what was going to happen, and she stacked the deck, so that Ultimecia would fall, but it would still be alright for her. She could still go back to her and Cid's army."
The man in red crouched down. He pushed back his cowl. His eyes were flat and strangely pale, oddly lifeless. His hair was long and dark, so that he seemed like a Knight of old, like an illustration in one of Seifer's books. He was very handsome, but there was a thuggish cruelty to the curl of his lip. It mocked Raijin. Reminded him of Seifer.
"The SeeDs – a kind of sunlight army," he said, thoughtfully as though he were putting something together. "You know," he continued. "I have a friend who's rather interested in news of Edea, come to think of it. She hasn't heard from her in an age." He put a friendly hand on Raijin's cheek. Intimate.
Raijin bit down on his bile.
Squall was still in Seifer's past, all through that whole night. But at first it wasn't so bad. He was beginning to think that Seifer had a future.
This made him oddly pleased. It touched some human part of him, some part Rinoa had prodded at until it had woken up and responded. He was a still rival to Seifer in the worst ways, still worried that Seifer was leaping ahead, still grateful that he'd come out right and won Rinoa while Seifer had gone wrong and lost – well. Everything. But he also understood Seifer, and wanted Seifer back. This possessiveness was stronger than his competitive pride, it turned out. No one could have been more surprised by this than Squall.
It was night, here in Seifer's past. The place outside the windows was dark. Squall couldn't see where they were. Seifer's prison was lit by weird green lights in odd corners, never quite illuminating what Squall wanted to see, forever leaving all but Renata's tall form, two steps ahead, in shadow. She led Seifer out through back stairs, past empty rooms shrouded in darkness, into strange elevators where the grilles creaked ominously shut and the buttons were marked by weird symbols. It seemed to Squall that they were in a castle of eleven thousand rooms, a place that never ended.
Until they came out in an unfamiliar alley.
The prison wasn't a desert prison. It was in a city; that much was clear. The buildings on either side of it were cloaked in darkness and they faded away quickly as Renata and Seifer passed them. But Squall caught sight of – because Seifer caught sight of – more strange carvings. Horrible grimacing faces, odd little figures carrying hooks and knives and staves, scenes of battle, and fruits and animals he couldn't identify. Also geometric tiled walls that made him dizzy, and doorways where black smoke coalesced, and the clanging sounds of metal everywhere. Everywhere. This place was a hive of activity; there were persons bustling by, dressed almost in the style of the Estharians, but no one spoke to him and they rarely spoke to each other; instead there were the crackles of fires being lit just out of sight, and the clash of weapons, and the buzz of saws. The entire place had a strange light, sickly and yellow and artificial.
Where were they?
Finally, Seifer thought. I'm here.
Yes. But where?
"The trick is to get you out," Renata was saying. She had, along the way, devised a plan. Seifer didn't resemble the people of this place. Not in dress. Not in features. So she had a somewhat weak grip on his gunblade, and he walked in front of her with his hands clasped behind him, as though she were a jailer prodding him along and he were a handcuffed foreign captive. But Squall thought that Seifer made a poor kind of fake-prisoner. Seifer didn't do meek, subdued, or cowed very well - even at his worst, he'd worn desperation with a degree of put-on grandeur that had seemed pitiful at the time, but that he'd seemed unable to shake free of. That last-ditch pride was just him. So anyone who looked at him would have been hard-pressed to conclude that Renata had cowed him in any way. But they had darkness on their side, and in that darkness it seemed that no one looked too closely at them. They progressed around the edge of a building, its open door churning out black smoke, and met—
A wall? A solid, tiled wall, patterned with brilliant colors. Going far in every direction, and when Seifer craned his head to look, they could see that it went up, up, up, up, curving ever-so-slightly in a concave fashion, until it vanished into blackness.
As though the city were ensconced by it.
Seriously. Where were they? Renata nudged Seifer gently to the right, down a set of steps, and then they were in a tunnel beneath the city, also tiled in every direction, curving up over their heads, trapping them underneath. There were what looked like advertisements set into the walls, strange pictures of people laughing just a little too cheerfully, of dark pools in tranquil caves that were just a little too perfect.
The writing on the ads wasn't anything Squall could read. This worried him. He thought he could remember what language that was, even if it wasn't a language he could decipher. But when he reached for the memory it just wasn't there.
Seifer could read it. That was the odd thing. See The Stalagmites of Sodor! and Lukos Wrigby, The Gladiator of The Century, Faces Off Against Fifty Leowyrms! Match This Hynesday At Five! The ads came to Squall translated, filtered through Seifer's brain. And soon enough Squall was deciphering them too, almost with borrowed knowledge, and it came as some shock when he saw smaller notices tacked up here and there on the tiled walls, in Principle, with proclamations like:
Traveling Without Your Identification Is Frowned Upon and
Deluxe Cars Forbidden To Skins.
People hurried past them, and soon enough they were lost in a crowd. And then in the distance Squall heard – because Seifer heard – the shrieks of more metal and the click-clack of rails.
A subway. They were in a subway. But—but that was ludicrous. No city had an underground subway. Not anymore, anyway. Squall tried to recall when he'd learned about one that did (he was sure he'd learned about it), but the memory wouldn't come to him. Was it Deling City? Had they had one, but shut it down, because of totalitarian activity? No, that wasn't it. Timber, maybe. City of trains. Or maybe—
Now we're underneath the Underworld, Seifer thought, with a kind of satisfied wonder.
What?
"We have to take the regulars," Renata was saying, now that they were in that special kind of crowd: a group of people so frenetic and so large that there was no chance of anyone paying them the slightest attention. She'd dropped the jailer act and now held the gunblade limply, like she didn't know what to do with it and didn't want to accidentally slice anybody open. Seifer took the dilemma out of her hands. He took his blade back with ease. Renata blinked at him, but quickly recovered. She said, "Look, we can only get one of you out at a time."
"Raijin first," Seifer said, without even thinking about it.
"What? No! Not him. You. Do you understand what they're going to do to you? They're taking you to the—"
Again the word. The sorceress word. The one they didn't know. Though Seifer had abandoned the thought of Renata being a sorceress some time ago. He simply seemed to know in his bones that she wasn't, and, oddly, Squall understood that. There was a spark of strength to Rinoa, and a heavy undercurrent of power that had blanketed Ultimecia, that any Knight felt right away. But Renata didn't have that strength or power. She was like normal people were: blank, nothing reaching out to tug at the mind.
She repeated the word, urgently this time. She brought a slim dark hand up and hit Seifer's chest with it, as if to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. He simply looked at her, unimpressed and somewhat annoyed, because this was Seifer she was dealing with, and if all it took to knock sense him was a hit to the chest, then Squall would have accomplished it years ago.
Seifer shrugged off his annoyance. He said, "Repeat that."
"The Gallery," said Renata.
Or, rather, she didn't say the Gallery. She said the same word – the sorceress word. And something clicked in Seifer's brain, the way it had with the advertisements. And so then suddenly he knew what she was saying. And Squall knew, as well, before Seifer repeated the word to her back in Principle, to be sure.
"I guess that is the translation," she said, furrowing her brow. "But it doesn't matter."
Only Seifer thought it did. He was searching his mind now for why, there on the crowded train platform, as at home in this odd place as he ought to have been (but never quite was) at Garden. And Renata had to grab his sleeve and pull him onto the train when it came, so bothered was he by the fact that he couldn't access the memory. Gallery. The Gallery. Dammit, I saw it! I know I did.
Squall was just as confused. Did he mean his Gallery of Failed Knights?
The strange thing was, it was almost like by thinking this he restored the memory to Seifer. Seifer, who didn't even know Squall was there (how could he?) hit on the thought right away, plucked it from Squall's mental grasp, held it alight, and examined it, even as Renata dragged him along and shoved him in a corner of the train.
"Are you listening?" she hissed.
The trains had black cars and putrid green ones. The black stayed closed. The green opened. Their insides had hard metal seats that were all taken and too many people piled in all around them, so that it was oppressively hot. With all the hauteur of an old Dolletian nobleman, Seifer shrugged out of his heavy coat. Renata took it confusedly, tricked into playing his steward. Seifer waved at her again, as though to suggest he might be open to hearing what she had to say.
But he had bigger things on his mind.
Seifer had been time compressed along with the rest of them. It hit Squall as something of a surprise, but then he berated himself for it. Of course Seifer had been time compressed. Ultimecia's spell had had no real rhyme or reason to it. They still weren't sure how many people had been affected when she'd compressed time. Most, among them Laguna and Ellone and others staying safe in Esthar, equipped with Dr. Odine's knowledge and his gadgets, and fully aware of what had been happening, had been fine. They suffered some nausea in the moment Ultimecia had fucked the timeline, some sense that the universe had gone off its tilt. They'd seen faraway places, long-gone people, but nothing that could hurt them. They all knew to remain firm, strong, and keep to good memories, fortifying memories, so that they could draw strength from their past and their loved ones and pull themselves back into their present.
But then there had been others. A family in Dollet reported horrible visions, images of soldiers raiding houses, ash falling from the sky. The people of Winhill claimed ghosts had begun rising from the floorboards – some of those ghosts their own, come back to warn them with cryptic rolling eyes and horrible grimaces and flowers where their eyes should be. In Fisherman's Horizon, more than one person had looked outside their window and seen not the ocean, but the vast Estharian plains. A few had decided to go riding on them, as if in a daze, imagining up beckoning chocobos just beyond the docks, and thankfully most of the fishermen were also good swimmers or else after Time Compression there would have been a whole lot of sudden drownings to account for. Trabia Garden had seemed healthy and whole again, its modest towers shining on its once-again green fields, for a single instant, for all the survivors, with the dead peeking from the windows, opening their mouths to greet their friends and letting out only black smoke instead. And no Trabian could say whether it had been Time Compression at all, or just a mass hallucination.
If all those people had been affected, then it stood to reason that Seifer, who'd been so intimately connected to the one responsible, should have suffered too.
Squall had ultimately fallen out of Ultimecia's castle and into his own past. Seifer had made the opposite journey. Time Compression had dragged him forwards, into the castle, running parallel to the rest of the orphanage gang. While they'd defeated sorceresses and monsters and gazed with horrified wonder at the sheer empty creepiness of the place, Seifer had found the castle a different experience entirely.
In one room there were scores of people chattering. Their faces were small bits of blurred colors and shapes, like sudden static on an old television. But there they were all the same, glitches in old-fashioned dress, beckoning to Seifer. Sieur, Sieur. He'd passed in through double-doors at one end, then out through the double-doors at the other, only to come back through the same room, in a different time, now all the windows fitted with bars and hung with green army fabric, rows of plastic-topped tables manned by rows of dark, desperate looking men, all working under the watchful eye of a guard, who beckoned Seifer forward. There was a woman on his arm, pale and small with bright hair – sometimes gold, sometimes red. Sir, Sir. Out again through the double doors.
And so on, an infinite loop, always something new each time, until he thought he would go crazy with it. And just when he'd thought that, there he was in a new room, a new grand hall. And made to repeat the process over. At times, it was Edea who was with him, the edges of her form blurry and indistinct, sobbing for some reason. At others it was Cid, first smiling indulgently down at him, then morphing into a taller, more threatening form, calling him worthless, calling him dishonorable, a coward – the GF Odin, who he'd struck down.
Time Compression made no sense. Dreams and reason and self were supposed to fall away. You were supposed to become unaware of yourself, of where you began and the world ended. That was what had happened to Squall. That was why he'd needed Rinoa.
Not so for Seifer, who stalked through life full of unfilled cravings, famished for something no one could figure out. Time Compression only crystallized that ache inside him, that yearning. It had grown stronger and stronger and harder to resist all while he'd been serving Ultimecia. Then she'd forced all the world into a single instant. And in that instant Seifer was hungrier than ever before, with less chance of ever seeing himself sated. Simply walking in an endless loop, desperate, ravenous and empty.
And so at one point he stopped. He ignored the forms all around him; the strange woman, patting his arm; a dark girl just ahead; Cid Kramer; his posse, all comingled with the faces of dead soldiers he recalled from his SeeD tests. He brought up a hand, and could see the odd transparency to his fingers, his skin gone paper white and stretched over each bone segment. He had the odd sense that he'd overdosed on his sorceress's magic, and now all his body was in the process of dying, beginning to match his ragged coat, falling away, and in time he'd become only the thing that he was inside, the unfulfilled thing, himself without a mask, as his outer form left him and rotted away.
Seifer saw a glimpse of himself for the first time. Cruel and careless. A junkie for his dream. A starving thing. Someone who'd gone after his desires to the fullest, devoured and devoured, and come out with—what?
Nothing. A loss of control. He'd ceded himself to Ultimecia, wholly and completely, convinced he was in charge the whole time. And in fact he'd only lost those parts of himself that were his protection against the world: his sense, his reason, his hope of heroism and worth, his identity. He'd lost who he wanted to be. And the really horrible thing was: it wasn't his sorceress who had turned him inside out like this. She'd done something worse. She'd convinced him to turn himself inside out.
She appeared before him. It was her; he knew it was, even as the edges of her form shifted, as she grew white wings like Rinoa, as she shrunk and seemed like any Deling City girl in fancy clothes, as her eyes went as perfectly warmly gold as Matron's. She said, staring at him, "So you're going to be my Knight?"
"No," he'd said. "No, no, no, no. no."
"It's already happened," she reflected, her form still indistinct. She became Rinoa, for a second, in Adel's arms. It hit some chord inside him, and then he felt like the chord was ripped out, and like his body was fading away even faster. "It's already happened, and it's happening, and it will continue to happen. Every moment in the timeline is the same. That means it can't be changed. It happens now. It will happen over and over and over again. You will always be this, in the end."
She gestured at him. He looked down. His feet, legs, hips, chest – formless. Not strong, not heroic, not likely to go down in history. Just nothing. He turned and ran. Around him, the rooms looped and looped. They changed slightly. But in the end they were all the same, and each one more senseless and worthless than the last.
Like him.
Squall had had Rinoa to pull him out of Time Compression. Seifer had no one, or at least at first he didn't. When help came, it was as horrible and confusing as anything else here – simply a hand, drawing him not out of the room, but down.
Strange. He'd never thought to head down. For one thing, he hadn't been thinking according to the absurd rules of Time Compression. So he'd assumed that the floor would be in the way.
"Who are you?" he demanded of his rescuer.
"A guardian," they said, in a voice that sounded flimsy, far-off, and hard to make out.
They dropped him in the Gallery. He didn't know how he knew it was called that; maybe his rescuer had whispered it to him. But it was a Gallery. An enormous hall, with beautiful metal walls with blue whorls and silver script on them like the lecture halls at Garden, only here there were assembled not desks and computer consoles and a bored teenage instructor, but Knights. Only Knights.
All the Knights. Many Seifer knew, for Seifer knew more about knights than maybe any other person in the world. And many he didn't know. They were still, peaceful, and calm, like statues, except that when he touched them their eyes fluttered, they cocked their heads, they responded to him. He was fast-fading at this point, but these long-dead figures were mockingly whole compared to him: in fact, they practically shone with vitality. He wandered among them for some time. Daemon Carteret was dark-skinned, not Dolletian-seeming at all – who knew? But it had to be him, for there was his famed scythe and he wore the colors of Domitia herself.
Ignotus Romulus and Iseult Neve, enemies until they'd drawn their last breaths, sat facing each other. She wore the blue sari of old Balamb, and her legendary sword gleamed wickedly at Ignotus's throat. He, for his part, had that red painted face, his trademark mourning band painted across his throat.
Each one looked savage, unpredictable, powerful, healthy, and alive. All alive. As though the world would never permit them to die. Never. They were too valuable. Even the ones Seifer didn't know – men with mechanical steeds and wickedly sharp teeth, women with claws for fingernails and blood marring their soldiers' tunics – imparted a sense of being useful, being worthy, being unafraid.
This was the hall, and these the people, that had long haunted and populated and fed Seifer's hungriest dreams.
"Self-control isn't an issue for them," noted his rescuer. "They're beyond that. They were successful Knights."
"It is for me," Seifer admitted bitterly, speaking over a rage and despair that seemed to mount in his fast-disappearing throat. "I – I—"
"Lost control. Fucked up," his rescuer said. They sounded like Cid. The same subtle recrimination, the same patronizing pity. "Come here. Look at this."
And his rescuer led him to the back. The figures became more powerful, more inhuman, their clothing older and more curious. Until at last they found one spot, one corner, that was –
Empty. Just an empty chair, forlorn and abandoned. One imperfect, lone spot in the gallery of heroes.
"You've demolished the one who should have gone here," Seifer's self-appointed guardian told him. "You, uncaring, and heedless, have made piecemeal out of the latest Knight to bear the name. What's a Knight worth, when he works only for evil? Now the dignified, worthy, noble creature that belonged here can never take his rightful place. He no longer exists."
He? Who was he?
"Dishonorable wretch that you have become—" clarified the guardian.
"No!" Seifer cried. "I'm not! This is my place! I belong here. I know I do. With the Knights. Gimme a chance—"
"When has anyone ever given you a chance?" snapped his rescuer. "No one does. You aren't worth it. Your chances you have to take. So if you want to take your place here, then take it. Find the Gallery."
"Where?" Seifer shouted, as best he could. He felt as though his own voice were growing tinny and flimsy and far away, as though soon he would fade into nothing and then he'd never be able to take anything at all, let alone a second chance.
"Down," snorted his rescuer. "Down, down, down."
And then Seifer had felt a jerk on the insubstantial parts of him that still existed, and a film came over him like his eyes had been closed the whole time and he'd never realized. He opened them. Fujin and Raijin were staring down at him, concerned. They looked grubby, unhappy, and worried, but whole. They were, he thought wildly, though he'd never considered it before, very valuable people. Very good people. He wasn't. He'd need to snatch goodness and value and worth back.
"What's down?" he asked, apropos of nothing.
Fujin looked at Raijin. Raijin looked at Fujin.
"Is that, like, Galbadian soldier slang?" Raijin asked. "What's down instead of what's up? Makes sense. They're backwards, ya know? Nothing's down. Well. Okay. Maybe something has gone down. We think Squall won."
"TAKING YOU HOME," said Fujin.
Seifer barely processed this. He'd seen his true self. He'd seen his failure. But then, as was customary for him, he'd also seen a way out.
"I'm not going back to Garden," he muttered. "I need to go down."
"NOT GARDEN," Fujin said. "OUR HOME."
"Yeah," Raijin said uncomfortably. "We'll rest up at the Balamb hotel and then we're taking you to FH, ya know? You need a breather. You've already hit rock bottom, Seifer. You've gone as far down as you can go, ya know?"
There was a small television in one of the waiting rooms in the Deling City train station, and on it Selphie got to see her boyfriend also hit rock bottom. It was seven months after Seifer had made the trip there.
Irvine's voyage, unfairly enough, involved much more handcuffing. Not to mention the indignity of a sagging middle-aged prison guard giving Irvine a fatherly pat as he secured him for the transport back to Garden. Talking heads made sure to mention Irvine's sexual proclivities as much as possible and to speculate about the kinds of behavior Garden might condone. One commended General Caraway for his brilliant arrest.
Rinoa tapped her fingers on her red book. Stuffed it into her bag. Tapped her fingers on her chair arms. Someone on the television called Caraway a great protector of Galbadian moral values. Rinoa's tapping ceased. The chair next to her very quietly set itself on fire.
Selphie put it out. It was just as well that they were the only two in this particular waiting room. Even if Rinoa hadn't been feeling pyromaniacal, Selphie would still be feeling violent and unsettled. It was unpleasant enough to see Irvine slandered. When that happened, she couldn't help but identify in him not the tall, exciting, languid creature she was dating, but the sweet, unsure boy she'd known and defended to the rest of the orphanage gang ruffians. Her protective streak reared its head. If there had been Galbadians in here with the girls, offering their uninformed perspectives and jeering and discussing Irvine like he was something meant for communal dissection, Selphie might have been forced to do something very unwise.
As it was, she'd already let her inner aggressiveness get the better of her and now it reared its head on the television.
"I, personally, just don't think Garden should be sending violent and immoral people into our city," Tulip Ruta was saying. She was sitting in an girlishly-decorated room. She was now in a schoolgirl skirt and demure cardigan. She wore girlish pink ribbons in her nut-brown pigtails. "Personally, I think our nightclubs are going to attract people like Kinneas. But ever since Garden came public about SeeDs and what SeeDs are for, I just personally think they should be focusing on containing sorceresses. I don't appreciate being threatened just when I'm going out for a drink."
No mention was made of the fact that Caraway's goons had been the first ones to threaten her. It simply seemed as though Tulip (Official's Daughter, age 18, said the caption underneath her) had stumbled unwittingly into a small nighttime café only to be menaced by Irvine. And actually, from how this was being spun, it looked like Caraway had sprung into action and called a raid on the club purely to catch lascivious SeeDs lurking in the shadows. Whatever the General had actually been doing? Sneaking, commandeering, destroying, politicking, whatever it was they did, from their lofty General positions? Instead of playing morality police? No one bothered to even broach the topic.
"This is unbelievable!" Selphie said, furious. Angelo, under the seat, whined in agreement.
For one thing, even though it would have looked even worse for Garden to have two SeeDs caught out instead of one, she almost wished they'd mention her involvement. But no one did. If all they wanted to do was discredit Kramer's kids, then Irvine made a sufficient scapegoat. After a night in lockup, he was stubbly and unkempt. He had a kind of dangerous, long-haired, lower-class youth look to him, all bruised lip and too-tight trousers. His weapons and GFs – Exeter, short-range pistol, the ring that served as Siren's manifest – were stripped from him publicly, laid out to be consumed by the cameras, then packed away before all the watchful eyes of the world to be shipped back a Garden, as a sign of the Deling Interim Commissioner's good faith and willingness to abide by the agreement with Xu.
But the good faith thing didn't line up. There were no special rules that said SeeDs couldn't frequent the city's more questionable establishments. Just sections of their ceasefire that said they had to announce themselves and their business to appropriate authorities before coming within Deling limits. And that was just it. They had announced their business. No, not formally. Just to the freakin' General, and only when caught out. But they'd still announced it, which fulfilled the very hazy terms of their pact with Galbadia. And if Selphie knew Xu, then the Headmistress had sent out some misleading note to the Deling politicos as a CYA, since Xu was the queen of the CYA, and it would have been full of little technical points meant to clear her people in case of situations like this: I remind you that our mutual nonaggression is paramount in such unstable times and per the terms of our last agreement, SeeDs may not be limited in movement, their decisions must be given weight, and they are to be referred to Garden in matters of discipline.
Plus, the overarching detail that every nation on earth publicly bowed to was: SeeD existed to protect the sorceress and protect others from her. And Selphie and Irvine had technically abided by that in following her to Deling. Even if she hadn't been anywhere near them at the time of Irvine's arrest.
"Was the sorceress there?" a reporter asked Tulip Ruta.
Tulip had now acquired a fluffy white kitten. She petted it sweetly. She said, "I didn't personally see her anywhere. I grew up with her, so I know her—"
Next to Selphie, Rinoa gave a very un-Rinoa-like snort. She'd been very quiet since they'd left Caraway's mansion, completely innocuous barring some odd behavior like the kindling of municipal property, but this seemed to insult her in some special indefinable way that required acknowledgment.
"And, personally, even though she's a sorceress now because personally she wasn't the most sensible person, I don't think she would ever end up in a place like that, and I'm shocked that these are the kinds of people she hangs out with, but then just, like, speaking personally? She really was not the kind of girl to make an effort socially—"
"Balls," Selphie told Rinoa, eager to defend her even to a total imbecile on the television.
Rinoa seemed to be only half-listening, still not quite herself. She only shook her head and didn't otherwise respond.
"—and it's really sad that SeeD are the only people who will put up with her. But no, I didn't see her. I think personally her little bodyguard was only there for some fun."
Tulip's cat sniffed. Tulip sniffed as well. The reporter sniffed. There was a regular sniff-circle going on, designed to show how very irresponsible and disgusting and skeevy Irvine was.
"I am going to end that girl," Selphie told Rinoa. "Personally."
Rinoa still didn't respond. The reporters switched to discussing Garden over-involvement in Esthar and how Garden clearly favored the wicked East because of Squall Leonhart's strong patrilineal ties to the region. This was beyond silly, because Squall's father, the president of Esthar, was Galbadian by birth, even if that wasn't common knowledge. But then there was a bigger game being played here. That seemed to be what Caraway and Deling City did. Played political games. Even if some people in the Deling City inner circle knew about Laguna and his background, it was that unlikely they'd reveal it to anyone, since it benefitted them not at all to say that a Galbadian foot soldier had defected, hit the Timberi journalism racket, and eventually revolutionized Esthar for the better.
Just like, for some reason, it didn't benefit them to mention that Selphie had been present in the club. Or to reveal the false cover story Missy had given Tulip. Or the false cover story that Selphie and Irvine had given Caraway. Admittedly, piecing together all the lies Selphie and Irvine had operated under had to be confusing. But that didn't change the facts. Deling City probably had both cover stories in their possession right now, and they'd seen that Irvine junctioned Siren, with her magic-dampening abilities, so they might even know that SeeD was concerned about magic use. And they knew about the cadet at G-Garden who'd piqued SeeD's interest, and they probably suspected that Garden was poking around forsome reason that Garden didn't want to totally disclose.
But they were playing all these cards close.
It made no sense. It couldn't have hurt Deling City to come out and say that Selphie had been there too, or that the SeeDs had come in under the pretense of ferreting out a threat to the sorceress. If anything, insinuating that Selphie and Irvine had lied about that, or that they had only been trying to sneak into the seedier kind of club while neglecting their duties, would have done twice as much to damage Garden's reputation as a sniffy Tulip Ruta could do.
But Deling City wasn't going there with the story. Why not?
Maybe because it would cut too close to something they wanted to hide.
"They're in on it," Selphie realized. "Maybe they knew from jump why we were here. And so they orchestrated—"
Rinoa made a swift cutting motion with her hand in Selphie's direction. Rinoa wasn't even looking at Selphie, and in fact her other hand was absorbed in twisting something in her lap, so it seemed for all the world like she was only vaguely aware she'd done it. But the end of Selphie's sentence vanished. It had been there. Selphie had said it. Only now she hadn't. Rinoa had plucked it out of existence.
Selphie stared at her, a little terrified, mostly concerned. Rinoa didn't do stuff like this. Rinoa wasn't casual and comfortable with her powers. She attacked them like a student desperate not to flunk a very unpleasant research project. She read, and learned, and compiled all she could on them. And then she proceeded to use them as little as possible, because all the information made her vaguely upset, as though she didn't really want to have to be learning it.
"Rinoa, I have to ask again. Are you ok—" Selphie began.
The whistle of the approaching train sounded in the distance. Rinoa was out of her seat in a flash, faster than Selphie had ever seen her move. She grabbed Selphie by the arm with a grip that was leagues beyond Rinoa's usual level of strength.
"Kalm down," she told Selphie, even though Selphie was fairly sure she'd actually been doing a stellar job of staying calm. "We will talk at Garden."
She tugged Selphie out of the waiting room, into the greater station Hall, and down the escalator to where the latest express to Balamb had pulled in. No one asked them for their tickets as they got on because heads simply looked away as Rinoa passed, and in her haste to get on the train Rinoa herself seemed not to notice this. Angelo whined at their heels until they reached their designated compartment, where she vanished under the seats. Rinoa manhandled Selphie inside, then took a seat at the window and propped her elbow on the sill, leaning into her hand. Her brow furrowed. Her face changed subtly, going from deliberation to confusion to snappish annoyance, like she was dealing with things Selphie couldn't see or understand, operating on another level entirely, the way she was when she had to talk to her father.
Actually, it looked a lot like Rinoa was having a conversation. Only not with Caraway this time. With unseen voices in her head.
Selphie had been calm (if angry and a little scared) before. But now she was outright freaking out. She crept up to Rinoa as the train started up. Rinoa seemed not to notice the train, so hopefully she wouldn't notice Selphie. And so Selphie could try and coax her out of…whatever this was, and, barring that, she could cast sleep or something, and then at Garden they could figure out what was going on with her, why her powers seemed to have short-circuited her brain.
Rinoa reached out a hand before Selphie got close and grabbed Selphie's wrist.
Crap.
"It kan wait, Selphie," she said calmly. Then she did something weird. She took the things she'd been fiddling with in her other hand and dropped them into Selphie's hands instead. Her Manifests. The bangle that tied her to Leviathan. Alexander's simple white seal. These things weren't necessary for Rinoa to use magic, of course. She wasn't dependent on GFs; she was a sorceress and had her own power, not to mention that their encounter with Adel had shown that she was as good as a GF herself and could be junctioned like one, given someone sick enough and powerful enough to try.
But it was still bizarre that she would give up her Manifests. It was a point of pride for her boyfriend that no one would dare challenge her right to use Garden GFs, and for that matter a point of pride among her friends, as well. They didn't technically consider the GFs their own personal magic store, of course not. That was highly discouraged. GFs were Garden property, and offered to the SeeDs on largesse. All of them had acknowledged that and had delivered up many a GF for use monster-hunting in Esthar. Their group wasn't greedy.
But still. GFs meant power. They were the edge in just about any battle. When you got really good, something in you seemed to call to the more dangerous monsters out there. Moon monsters sniffed out strength and wanted to destroy it; that was the impulse that propelled them down to earth via the crystal pillar, according to Odine. The pillar gave off a kind of attraction to them, a hidden strength; it was some kind of beacon for stray magic. And the more powerful you were, the more you were basically indistinguishable from the pillar for them, and the more you could expect the really tough ones to come after you. But GFs still tore through them with alarming effectiveness. So. No one really wanted to give them up. Even Irvy, who had a complex relationship with them and who Selphie suspected really hated them, wouldn't have handed Siren over unless it had come to—well. Arrest.
"Sooo, am I just holding onto these for you, or…?" Selphie said, disconcerted.
Rinoa waved her away and went back to making faces at the window.
Alright. Casting sleep it was. Not because Rinoa was doing anything dangerous right now, unless you counted her sudden death grip. But because all the pieces – her weird quiet, her speech patterns, her unacknowledged magic use – added up to potential danger. And Selphie really didn't want anything else to go wrong before she regrouped with her friends and figured out what to do about it. If it turned out that Rinoa's powers were finally going haywire and she was a threat to the world, then probably it was better to knock the girl out before Xu figured it out. Because then they'd not only have to drag her to Esthar to fix her (again), but they'd have to fight Garden while doing it. And Selphie knew for a fact that Xu was a creative thinker and had already lined up a whole bunch of plans in case it came to that, and she really didn't want to test their luck or Rinoa's by tipping Xu off and seeing those plans fall into motion.
Selphie slipped the bangle on. Affixed the seal to her blouse. Took a second to acquaint herself with the two new personalities in her head, subtly taking stock of their abilities and nudging them towards the kinds of battle tactics she preferred, the way she'd been taught at T-Garden. Then she raised one hand behind her back and prepared to cast on her friend, feeling slightly traitorous all the while.
Selphie's phone rang.
Rinoa jolted up and stared straight at her, spooked by the noise. Dammit. There went Selphie's chance to cast sleep surreptitiously. The phone rang again. And again and again and again. Selphie had given up and answered it by the time Rinoa had turned back and resumed her k-heavy discussion with the voices in her head. Which couldn't even be her GFs at this point, since she'd given up her GFs.
"I need your help," Quistis said, as soon as Selphie hit the button to take the call. "I've lost control of my team!"
Well, that made two of them.
Quistis outlined a nightmare scenario, alone and trapped between Cid's skeevy secrets and two screaming teammates who wouldn't wake up. Selphie genuinely felt sorry for her, even if her own situation was just as dire and twice as infuriating. And even if she couldn't figure out why Quistis was calling her. Sure, Xu was busy and it was, like, four am where Quistis was, and Quistis was alone, and possibly Zell was wetting the bed? Maybe? It didn't sound like Zell. It did sound like maybe Quistis was just afraid of that happening. But Selphie was several thousand miles away and no expert on falling asleep and not waking u—
Or. Actually.
"Ellone?" Selphie offered.
"What?" said Quistis.
Keeping a careful eye on Rinoa, Selphie crossed to the seat opposite her and sat down, then unpacked what she knew about sleeping creepy. Ellone. Ellone did that. That was the Ellone thing.
"Okay, so, like, it happened to you too, right? You remember. We'd fall asleep, only not really," Selphie said. "We'd be in the middle of a mission –"
Quistis said, "You mean when she sent us to Laguna's time? We never started screaming that I can recall, and—"
"No, but then you don't know where Squall and Zell are," Selphie said. "You don't know who they are. I mean, you were Ward one time, right? He's not exactly a screamer. And then Kiros. I was Kiros once too. Do you want to know who the suavest, least panicky person in the world is? Kiros. Kiros could suffer through, I don't know, one of those world-ending apocalypses in those books Nida reads, and be fine. And mostly he was just running around making sure Laguna didn't waste all their money anyway."
"So you think Ellone's stuck them in the mind of someone suffering? Sent them back to face some kind of trauma? Why would she do that?"
"Why would she pick you and me for Kiros or Ward at different times?" Selphie said, shrugging. "Ellone works in mysterious ways."
"And it wasn't like she thought about it then. Maybe she's not thinking about the consequences now, either," Quistis added, a touch of condemnation in her voice. "She took us out of commission during a pretty serious time."
Ellone had basically been putting them in danger in order to unravel and change her own past. Which wasn't so great. She was a sweet girl, she'd been nice to them in Esthar, and Selphie vaguely remembered her as being fun to play with as a kid. But whoa: did that chick have problems. Selphie wasn't going to hold it against her: the actual experience of living as Ward Zabac and Kiros Seagill had been kind of fun. But getting there had had its rough points.
"I wonder if she knows how rat fink it was of her," Selphie mused. "Remember? I liked it, but it didn't feel nice at first. Like, like that moment when you're exhausted. Only I wasn't feeling tired until she messed with me. There I was, happy and perky—"
"Yeah," Quistis said. "She messed with our heads. Induced sleep. But Zell and Squall just fell asleep on their own."
"Well, maybe that just means she wouldn't have had to induce it," Selphie said. "They were already tired, so she didn't have to do it for them. Weird, how being tired is a part of it."
"So tired you don't really feel like you," Quistis said.
"Right," Selphie agreed, remembering. "And that other feeling! Remember? Not exactly dizziness. More like everything you should be feeling around you hits you through a filter, and you can't really control your body because it's suddenly so heavy. You're all twitchy. It's like it's not even your body anymore, and—"
Selphie stopped. Rinoa was looking at her. Very intently. With that same indefinable witchiness to her, that disconcerting element lurking in her eyes.
"Selphie?" Quistis said.
"Keep going," Rinoa said calmly.
Selphie had no idea why Rinoa should be so suddenly devoted to this particular topic, which she'd already heard about on many times, and after refusing to speak about anything for so long. But her instincts told her to do as her sorceress friend said, because her sorceress friend was unpredictable and creepy and maybe more than a little dangerous right now. So Selphie added, "You feel like, like you could almost be outside your body for a sec. Ellone whammies you with that. And then she takes you away. You've fallen asleep, you think, but really what happens is you're suddenly inside a dream. But the dream is—"
"Somebody else's life," Rinoa murmured. "You're connected to them."
She'd been interested in their Ellone travels before, but she'd never looked quite so satisfied or intense about it. Polite and engaged was Rinoa's thing. Not crazy-eyed like this.
"Is that Rinoa?" Quistis said. "Don't tell her about Squall! I mean. Well. Okay. Maybe do, since he is her boyfriend. But she's just going to worry, and she's not a SeeD."
"Don't tell me what about Squall?" Rinoa said suspiciously, evidently equipped with super-sorceress hearing. And even though Quistis was cursing on the other end of the line, Selphie was a little relieved. Because when she heard 'Squall,' something in Rinoa's eyes seemed to snap back into focus. She became a little bit more herself again. Selphie didn't know how she knew this; she just did. It was in how suddenly it was nice to have Rinoa looking at her again. It wasn't chilling.
Rinoa got up and held out her hand for the phone. Selphie debated whether to give it to her. Rinoa right now was better than she'd been all evening; hearing about Squall might stabilize her. But the news about Squall wasn't exactly good, and it wasn't like she and Rinoa could do anything about it just then, and what if the upset sent her off the deep end? Selphie was SeeD-trained to handle terrible scenarios like theirs and Quistis's without letting dire developments cloud her judgment. Rinoa, while a real champ about keeping up with SeeD most of the time, wasn't so trained.
Rinoa plucked the decision out of Selphie's hands. Because, quick as a flash, she also plucked up the phone. She put it to her ear and said, "Tell me."
Selphie watched uneasily as Quistis's barely-audible patter filled Rinoa in. Rinoa's face became stony. Oddly, there wasn't much change to her beyond that. She simply took the news in a little grimly. And all she said was, "Did you cast silence? And make sure they're not moving around too much so they don't hurt themselves?"
Both solid suggestions, SeeD-worthy suggestions, and apparently also suggestions that had occurred to Quistis.
"Good," Rinoa said. "Then the next step is to get them back to Garden. Do that. We'll meet you there." She was being unusually brusque, for Rinoa, but her tone wasn't unkind. She handed the phone back to Selphie. Selphie was fairly sure she wouldn't be able to improve on Rinoa's advice, so all she said was, "Then we can hunt down Ellone and figure out why this is happening. It's, like, going on the middle of the night in Esthar and she's a pain to get in touch with, but once we're back at Garden we can put an official stamp on it and she'll have to talk to us!"
Squall, had he been conscious, would probably not have approved of handling Sis in this manner. Like she was just some stranger, like she wasn't Sis anymore. But that was the thing. As far as Selphie knew, she was some stranger at this point. Ellone had some contact with Squall, and was always welcoming when the group dropped by Esthar. But she had effectively cut ties with Garden, and besides this she'd never fully explained or even apologized about the whole sending them back in time thing.
Plus, given what she was apparently doing to Squall and Zell, this time she'd really overstepped.
"That's one option," Rinoa said, sitting calmly back down. "We can brainstorm more and vote on it when the rest of us are all together. Me, you, Quistis, Irvine."
And that was her final word. She was silent and focused on something all the way to Garden, though weirdly twitchy about noises and so on her guard every time Selphie tried to cast anything that after a while Selphie just gave up. Rinoa seemed more in control of her magic after touching base with Quistis, so that was good. She didn't force the crowds of Balamb to part when they arrived. Of course, that was probably because there were no crowds in Balamb. Balamb had a population of like a hundred people. Rinoa then glided mostly magic-less down the path to Garden, and if they encountered no monsters on the way then Selphie was going to be an optimist and put it down to luck instead of magic. Still…
"You aren't scared about showing up in front of Xu like…this?" she asked Rinoa.
Rinoa said, "Like what? There's nothing wrong with me."
Selphie begged to differ.
"Really? We're going with that?" she asked Rinoa. "You've been pretty weird."
Rinoa fixed her with a surprisingly apologetic look. "I know," she said. "I'll tell you when we're at Garden."
But in Xu's office, it became clear that when she said 'we', she meant more than just herself and Selphie.
"I know what's going on in Deling," she announced. "But I need Squall here when I explain it. And Zell. And Quistis and Irvine. Now. So bring them in and then I'll tell you."
Xu raised an eyebrow as though to indicate that she doubted Rinoa knew anything and doubted even more that she was going to be taking any orders from Rinoa. Next to her, Nida nodded amicably at the news that Rinoa had supposedly cracked a major case down in Deling, then returned to a fat book on the Ancient Centrans.
"Rinoa, that's nice," Xu said, "But your failure to stick with your team got one of my people – an actual SeeD, by the by – arrested, and we're still no closer to getting our hands on the GF—"
Something about this made Rinoa smile.
"Don't worry about that," she said.
Xu stared at her, irritated. Then she stared at Selphie. Selphie shrugged.
"Bring in Squall and Zell and Quistis and Irvine—" Rinoa said.
"Squall and Zell and Quistis are on a mission," Xu said irritably.
Nida cleared his throat. "About that," he began.
When he was done explaining, Xu looked ready to murder someone. Selphie felt for her. She expected Rinoa to feel for her, too, because Rinoa was a feel for you kind of person, but when she looked over Rinoa was only fiddling with the rings she always wore on a chain.
Something else about her was different, Selphie realized. Something besides the weird disconnect from her usual self. Something small. It took Selphie a second to get what.
"That's a nice choker, Rinoa," she said. Xu was in the process of chewing Nida out with laser-focus and no small amount of intense cruelty and didn't hear her, and so didn't chastise her for chatting with Rinoa during a debrief.
Rinoa's hand flew up to touch her new choker. It was loosely draped on her, a long silver oblong shape nestled slightly below her collarbone. Selphie noticing it made her look almost apprehensive for some reason.
"It looks familiar," Selphie said, because it did, but she couldn't place how. "I think I've seen it before?"
Probably Rinoa had worn it at some other point in time. But she just gave a nervous smile; she didn't say anything to confirm it.
