Author's Notes – Again, will beta later. I am le tired.

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Chapter XII – The Changing Tides

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3rd FLOOR – SURGERY & OTHER PROCEDURES

Reading that line in the floor listing plaque right beside the elevator compelled me to steel my nerves and take a steadying breath.

After a walk around the second floor circuit, I decided that I needed to take Squall's suggestion and get to the bottom of this. And so here I was, fresh out of the elevator, looking at the plaque to make sure I was actually on the 3rd floor even though I'd made sure that I'd pressed the correct button.

I was stalling, pure and simple and I didn't care that I was well-aware of this. I needed this moment to collect myself and order the jumble of thoughts tangled up inside my head. I wouldn't bother checking any of the rooms, I knew that much from the get go, but I needed to figure out what I was to say to Nurse Bear if I found her.

Getting transferred here was not a coincidence; it just had to be related to her saving my sorry behind from the clutches of the scientists running the show behind the scenes. But what I had to wonder was the reason behind not even telling me and me having to hear it secondhand like I had. Did she just come to work today and get told once she got here for her shift? No. She was always had steady 1pm to 11pm afternoon shifts and it was only a hair past 11 am right now. Seeing as I'd spotted her flit around the second floor yesterday like normal, that was unlikely. Or did that just mean she was told yesterday? Ugh. I guess that meant that both possibilities that she kept it from me deliberately or just accidentally were still there. Not to mention the ones where she requested the transfer herself too.

Needless to say, it didn't help the knots in my stomach.

It boiled down to two simple, unsettling scenarios – either my stupid stunt was the breaking point for her and made her want to transfer to a less-drama-filled floor or my stupid stunt made someone else force her to transfer to another floor.

And even though I'd made it all the way here, part of me wasn't ready to face that the reality here was that I was to blame and someone else suffered for it. No, I was still aimlessly staring at the plaque and I didn't care who saw me. I blamed my Caraway genes for my affinity for staring at things despite the handicap of lacking the intensity that grey eyes brought to the game. Everyone else will just have to deal.

Though…remembering my past sarcastic thoughts about my relatives having staring matches for dates, I had to wonder if this would count as the start of a torrid affair with an inanimate sheet of hard plastic? Yeah, I guess it would. Totally a romance for the ages that would be eventually novelized-slash-exploited by the shittiest of authors. A girl in love with an inanimate object or objects – 'cause I'm pretty sure that forced and badly-written love triangles are still a staple as far as those kinds of books go - would become a new phenomenon. People who weren't diehard fans would make fun of the horrible sex scenes - after all, they'd have the preteen market to corner so those types of objects as the love interest would be out of the question - and I would be sad because I wouldn't see any royalties to compensate for my embarrassment.

Ok, so it was official.

I, Rinoa Christine Heartilly needed to stop procrastinating because I was starting to even weird myself out. Badly.

Ungluing myself from this spot, I started to walk towards the place that would have been where the Nurses' station would have been on the second floor – it was only a wall here, however. From there, I had a simple decision to make – go left or right? Looking in both directions, I took the non-populated side; I couldn't spot Nurse Bear anywhere yet and I figured it would increase my chances at finding her before possibly being asked to leave by another doctor. Sadly, my mascot-ness didn't exactly transcend to floors other than second floor so the surgeons would probably think that I was just a visitor who was lost.

Walking down the left corridor, I kept a brisk pace and my head low, trying gain as much distance as possible without breaking into a noisy jog. If I thought that smell of anti-sceptic was harsh on the second floor, this hallway had to be ten times as worse despite everything else – the wall colour, tiling and even layout – was virtually identical to that aforementioned floor. Ugh. My nose hairs felt like they were getting burned off and I was half-tempted to hold my breath. I didn't because I knew I wouldn't be able to not start panting loudly once I attempted to start breathing again so I just started mouth breathing instead as I rounded the first corner.

But it didn't matter what I did because my breath was knocked out of me in the same way – Nurse Bear was there, having come out of an open door. I had no chance to prepare; we locked eyes almost immediately and I couldn't help but notice the dullness in her normally-warm brown eyes. I didn't like that I'd seen them look so different from the eyes I'd known for three years yet again within the span of less than a week.

"Um…hi Nurse Bear. Funny to see you here." I lamely greeted. The lameness of it made her frown.

"Rinoa…you have no business being on the third floor. Please go back to the second floor or the cafeteria." she calmly told me.

My stomach bottomed out in disbelief. I had to ask myself, did that really come out of Allison Bear's mouth? The same woman who'd took it upon herself to be a guardian-like, possibly mother-like, figure to me and always gave me the time of day no matter how busy she was? Because that didn't sound like her at all – all that the coldness came from an alien, it just had to. She was my friend. She wouldn't speak to me like I was some kind of disobedient child. She sure as hell didn't even while she was warning me against pursuing that matter with Ellone.

"They made you do this." I spoke with a small measure of growing, but still fragile, confidence. "You wouldn't be here if they hadn't. You liked being on the second floor!"

"I'm not at liberty to say anything to you. I wasn't even supposed to speak to you period." she curtly told me, in a flat, emotionless tone. This…this felt like betrayal. "…I'm sorry but I need to go."

As she left, walking past me to disappear into an open door that quickly closed and locked behind her, I just stood still. My feet were glued to the floor and I was too emotionally-paralyzed to move – banging on the door, screaming and yelling in vain for an explanation that would never be given to me wasn't even an option to explore. It hurt too much.

All I could do was cry my eyes out and refuse to be budged from my spot by the passerby doctors and nurses until Zell came. Even then, he had to carry me out of there on his back. The worst part was I couldn't even explain why to him and he didn't push me, reminding me of another low point in my life I wish I could have left buried in the past.

Then I started crying even harder at the realization that he was my only friend in this world left and if he left for greener pastures or was taken away from me for whatever reason…I'd have no one. I'd truly be alone, left to rot in this hellhole until the day I drew my final breath.

That realization hurt. It hurt so goddamn bad.

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The next few hours went by in a blur. Cocooned in my bed's covers and hidden away from the rest of the world by having my divider curtains not drawn back for once, I dared to poke my head out of the sheets and open my eyes to let some of the weak March sunlight in, struggling to remember the words spoken and promises made to me by Zell as the feeble rays still managed to burn my retinas. They hadn't sedated me - sadly, the practice of drug first, ask questions later wasn't popular here – but it didn't really matter as my own thoughts had done a pretty damn good job at numbing me inside out anyway. Everything seemed so distant, so far removed that I wondered if I was dreaming. No, dreaming implied good things. This was a nightmare – one where I was trapped in this body with nowhere to go, no hope to be found.

I closed my eyes again. Opening them in the first place was a waste of time, why was I bothering? There was nothing for me but pain, anguish and whatever the hell else life could dangle in front of me that I would never have.

But fate, as I knew, was indeed a fickle thing. Not even a good minute after I'd shut my eyes that I heard the light swishing of moved curtains and a slight creak of the chair facing my back beside my bed, telling me that someone sat themselves in it. Curiosity was my greatest downfall, and it probably always would be – I couldn't let the mystery, as tiny as it was, be just that – a mystery.

I shifted around to face the other way, opening my eyes and blinking them hard.

"What are you doing here Squall?" I croaked.

He still looked a little worse for wear but the facial scruff was gone and his jet-black hair considerably less oily and matted – it was clear to see that he was feeling well enough to manage a shower and somehow mysteriously acquire shaving supplies.

"…Something happened if that friend of yours carried you in here." he answered in a less manner of fact way than I'd been anticipating.

I couldn't tell if that was actual concern for me or if it was just for my ability to carry out the promise. Despite what common sense would dictate, I kinda thought it was the former even if he'd deny it outright. And despite the fact that I was ignoring common sense in my thoughts, I did decide to exercise some in my actions by not putting him on the spot about that. It was…kind of nice not to bother about semantics like that. But even so, it didn't change the fact that I had to answer him without really answering him.

"I hadn't eaten since lunch yesterday and it kind of caught up with me." I fibbed, using the first thing that came to mind. "It was just a dizzy spell. Don't worry about me."

"You're lying."

I should have denied his accusations but I decided not to, going against common sense again. I didn't have the energy and quite frankly, I didn't want to sabotage the hopeful end to our last conversation – as fleeting as I knew his stay would be and as pointless as making friends in transient circumstances was, I still wasn't the type to actively try to burn bridges.

"I was." I candidly admitted. "I just…don't know how to explain this. And honestly, you have enough on your own plate as it. You don't need me to burden you with something personal that doesn't affect my promise to you."

"You were carried in from the elevator." he said point blank. "It does affect me if your personal matters involved Nurse Bear."

I was a little taken aback and maybe a little impressed. "She's not helping us. She can't." I told him before leaning forward and going into a low whisper. "…She's done all she can already."

Then I caught something. I scooted a little closer to make sure I wasn't seeing things or that it was just a trick of the light.

"…Your eyes," I found myself saying – I felt like I was somewhat beside myself, "…did you notice that they went back to their natural colour?"

"…No." he said, the hint of equal parts confusion and disbelief in his voice corroborating that no.

In that moment, I shed the cocoon of blankets and left the pity party of one to start fishing in the tiny drawer beside my bed on the left to find a compact. After locating it, I opened it and placed it in front of his face. When he grabbed it, I noticed that his fingers weren't particularly warm. It left me wondering…did he also not have a fever anymore? I stayed silent for now, waiting until he could see what I saw first.

When he'd quietly returned the compact to me after confirming what I had said, I wasted no time. "Do you still have a fever right now or did it break while I was gone? Your hand didn't really feel warm like you did when I handed you that smoothie days ago."

Almost sheepishly, he answered, "…It did. I take it that it's not supposed to?"

"No. If you were a normal case and not CET, it wouldn't be too high but still there. Your eyes definitely shouldn't be back to your normal colour either. But I'm pretty sure this is a good thing." I tried to reassure. "People who turn into zombies wouldn't have their normal colour go back. Looks like you'll make it out of this ok."

He looked at me skeptically. "If this is a new precedent for this…I wouldn't be jumping to conclusions."

"To paraphrase our favourite nurse, being a 'special snowflake' is fine, really." I started to explain with a touch of humour while trying not to think too much about who I'd referred to. "There's no real uniform way to go through transition – it's pretty much like puberty that way. Some people go through the stages faster or slower and some people get a hit with a ton of zits while others stay pretty much blemish-free – nobody puts too much stock into how fast you go through it or whether or not you get a serious case of pizza-face. In your case, you just happened to be a short little shrimp and then next thing you know, bam – shot up to six feet tall and suddenly everyone and their mother wants you to sign up for the basketball team because you're towering over everyone in gym class."

He gave me an incredulous, and possibly slightly and secretly amused, look. "…That was the strangest metaphor I've ever heard."

In spite of myself, I snorted. "Trust me, that's tame by my standards. I mean that. You don't want to hear the ones I've thought up in my head. They'd make your head spin if I didn't keep them up in there and actually said them out loud. I wasn't lying about the over-active imagination thing. It's kind of a side effect of living inside my head for so long with nearly no one to talk to here – keeps me sane in a way even if my metaphors are usually anything but. I never used to be like that before coming here. Or, well… it wasn't as bad."

"…I get that." he calmly said. "It's…not always easy living inside your head all the time."

I smiled a little. Part of me couldn't believe that he was actually talking about anything other than how he felt like shit, Ellone or our noble quest to find her. Maybe he was different when he wasn't waylaid by illness with people who weren't total strangers who were oddly attempting to pry in his life? Who knew.

"Yeah, no argument there." I agreed, before pausing for a second to deliberate on something. "…For whatever reason, Nurse Bear isn't allowed to talk to me anymore now that she got transferred to 3rd floor. I kind of lost it. Making and keeping friends or just having some kind of friendly chit-chat is hard to do when this place isn't meant for any of that, you know? Spending my time in the library with my nose in a great book just doesn't cut it sometimes."

He shrugged. "…And you can't leave because you don't have the means to?"

After getting over my momentary surprise that he'd remembered what I'd said a couple of days ago, I scrunched my face and shook my head. "Even if could, it'd end up being the same situation, just in a different place. Selphie and Zell were my only friends growing up because I had dark hair and eyes and was pretty much in and out of hospitals a lot. I wish my father would have let me be educated about transition though - then I could have at least figured out what was making people uneasy around me. Maybe I could have tried to dye my hair another colour to make things easier too."

"…So your mother died in a transition?"

My eyeballs wanted to jump out of their sockets. "-How did you…?"

"You've only referred to your father when you said you couldn't go home. You used the past tense when you talked about your mother's birthday. And if I did my math correctly, she had you at 21 so it wouldn't be all that impossible – makes sense given that not letting you know about transition seems like a stupid decision, potentially suggesting an illogical knee-jerk reaction of some kind fuelling that choice."

I was still so floored that I couldn't even question why he asked that in the first place – for some reason, I just chalked that up to poor-ish social skills and let it go. "…You are too smart. Way too smart Squall." I told him. "You need to be a federal secret agent once you're out of here or something as equally as detective-y."

"He's not the only one who's detective-y." a familiar voice interjected. I didn't need to see his face poking through the curtains to know who it was. But when he finally did just that, Zell, Squall and I ended up doing this weird kind of three-way stare thing - I think it was sort of borne from a combination of Zell and Squall not directly knowing each other, thus making the former's intrusion kinda awkward, and my aforementioned affinity for staring coming into play. This stare-a-thon would totally be the inspiration for the greatest love story ever known, screw the whole a girl and her plaque thing.

…And I think I puked a little in my mouth just now. I loved Zell like a brother so that thought was just…no, god no.

"So you're detective-y too?" I asked, trying to ignore the additional 'no, oh god no's challenging my capacity to think straight.

"Yeah. And you're not going to like what I found out." he said, all of his usual mirth absent from his voice. My stomach was doing flips already. "Nurse Bear was found dead in one of the bathrooms. And I don't think it was a suicide."