A/N: No time for my usual long-winded author's note, as I'm editing this on my lunch break, but that's good right? Means you guys can get to the chapter faster. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for sticking around, guys. Also, the idea of soldiers being drafted into Garden came from DK's 'Story', which I recommend you read.

Chapter Seven

Timber Hotel

Timber

It is endearing the way they fawn over him.

He is taken away on a stretcher, born across the muddy streets toward the waiting transport, and they follow along beside him all the way back to this transport, joking and mocking and lightly punching his shoulders, ruffling his hair, pinching his cheeks.

He swats them away like flies, and they break apart, circle, dive back in.

He calls Seifer something she does not want to repeat; he makes a feeble swipe for Irvine's hat; he is shut away inside the transport smiling.

You smile when you can, in this sort of life, and sometimes that smile must be faked and sometimes it must be forced, but what she has noticed about this man with the black ink on his cheek and the bounce in his step is just how genuine his always seems to be. He is pale and drawn and shrunken in on himself beneath standard-issue wool and starch and his smile still tells them about how it is going to be ok, how they are all going to come through, and she wonders sometimes, when she cannot sleep, when the ceiling spreads itself out above her in white-winter forever, why men like Zell Dincht are here.

They believe in good so hard it hurts; they know down to the very deepest parts of their existence that they fight for righteousness, that this cause for which they take wounds and lose friends and die bloody is never wrong.

The world is divided, cut away down the middle: one side black and one side white, but how do you be that sure; how do you know that this man deserves to die and that one needs to live- how do you believe your fist has not fallen wrong, your bullet not gone astray-

She stands in the mud and watches the rain turn to snow and back again.

The transport spins its tires and flings mud into the sky and roars away in smoke white as snow.

She stands for a very long time.

"Trepe?" he calls.

She blinks herself back into this world.

"Let's go. The faster we kill the fuckers, the faster we get out of here."

A bird, a dune, a pair of hands stitched in white thread.

A boy and a swing and the taste of rootbeer, the scent of summer.

For years she learned and fought and trained beside him, and she never knew.

She never looked.

You go through life so sightless sometimes, and then out emerges the sun to drive its blind white needles through your eyes and still sometimes nothing is illuminated, there is still too much dark; you close your lids carefully over the needles and do not stare, refuse to see, and she's sorry, but this is how it has to be.

There was no before.

She did not know him and he did not know her and it's not his fault; it's not his failing: it just hurts so much, to catch glimpses of this before that she has lost, to tentatively touch the splintered pieces of these old memories and feel how raw they are, how much they ache.

She once read of a soldier who came home on leave, who leaned his rifle on the foyer of his childhood home and ran his fingers lovingly over his books and sat alone in gardens frosted in October death, and this soldier who put down his rifle almost could not pick it up again.

This is what these memories are, a sort of leave, a break: she was not always a soldier, and she once knew things beyond death and how to mete it out and when to accept it, and returning from all of this is just too hard.

He probably does not even remember this himself after all, and so why should she hold onto it; why should she grip something tight when everything she has clung to has only ever slipped itself through her fingers?

"Go get Squall and Selphie. We move out immediately."

The woods are hung with shadows and shapes; they blend together into one impenetrable smoke-white block.

They come alive.

The first time you see these animals come howling out of the fog, get ready to empty your pants.

They walk on two legs and they are clothed as humans; they wear dirt and blood and pieces of their friends in stripes on their cheeks, just like us, and that is the scariest damn thing of all, this mirror they hold up as they charge.

Through recruitment, through basic training, maybe even your first skirmish, you are right.

You are better than them. They are the mess, you are the mop, and it's time for a little clean-up on aisle five.

And then the woods come alive and you do not pick one or two off here and there, just to keep them at bay; you do not shoot only when you have to, because someone else has already aimed your way, because it is kill or be killed.

You are swept along on this thing that turns men into monsters and you add your banshee shrieks to the screams and you shoot, stab, burn, thrust your fingers into sockets and hold on tight, bite, kick, slam someone's brother into the mud and bring your rifle down onto his head until his rotten-melon skull comes apart at the seams; you smash your last grenade into the teeth of a man who is trying to surrender, who is pulled under this tide and does not resurface, you reach out with your bare damn hands and pinch closed a throat because you didn't want to be here you never wanted to be here-

Your boots punch through the mud and the blood and the limbs that stand on their own, you hold your rifle out before you wailing this awful beast cry and you hammer and stab and tear to pieces the spine of one who didn't get away fast enough, just a kid, maybe his first time out in these woods, and he falls and you scramble over him like he is garbage, you grind him down, you push him face first into the earth to live his last few moments surrounded in dark, breathing intestine slush.

Think I am better than them? Think because I am a writer, because I have crawled beneath the skins of these humans called 'protagonists' and forced myself to understand, that I flinch back, stand quietly on the sidelines?

I do not.

My boots punch through the mud and the blood and the limbs that stand on their own, and you already know the rest.

Someone swings a blow scraping past my ear and I turn, find his face with the butt of my rifle, pound his nose apart into splinters, keep going until his mouth is a soggy red smudge, until his little piano-key teeth stick themselves upright in the dirt, glistening.

Turn, stab, duck, roll- I fire a burst at point-blank range, and this man in front of me becomes shreds of uniform blowing in the wind, and now the ground heaves beneath me and somewhere off to my left dirt geysers, and I am thrown-

The ground slaps stars down over my eyes and I roll, spit, pop back to my feet, swing, swing swing-

You see people passing one another in the streets who smile and wave and nod to these strangers they don't have to be nice to, and you think, hey, the world ain't so bad after all; it doesn't have to be like this; mankind's done a lotta' shitty things to each other, but there's nothing like that in me, look, I'm nodding too, I just acknowledged that guy with the face full of moles who picks his nose and doesn't care who's watching. These geezer politicians who send our young men off to die for them- there's just somethin' about 'em, they ain't what's normal- that's why they're politicians in the first place, because there's a devil brewin' in 'em. And those soldiers- well, poor kids, they just weren't right in the first place; you don't stab a man through the face and twist your knife around in his skull until you pull it back out gleaming with brains if something didn't go real wrong at home.

But I'll tell ya' something.

When I was fourteen I found a bird in the weeds bordering the fence separating my house from Kiros'. Just a little thing, one wing torn almost in half; looked like a cat got it. It looked up at me so damn plaintively, flopping that torn wing pathetically across the grass, kicking its feet in the dirt, heaving, rolling, trying to get its legs underneath it- it broke my damn heart. I picked it up, cradled it against my chest, murmured that wordless nonsense you use to soothe babies and animals, and it pecked the shit out of me.

Almost ripped my damn thumb off.

I took it to the vet anyway. I wrapped my thumb and emptied the jar I kept stashed behind my dresser and you've never seen a kid run so fast before, my right hand trailing red-smeared toilet paper, my left hand cupping this stupid bird, and every cent I dumped from this jar I kept stashed behind my dresser went toward the rescue of this damn bird, who thanked me by trying to rip off my other thumb.

You take a kid like that, who can't stand to watch one dumb little ol' robin suffer, and you put him out here in these woods and he kills until his uniform turns from blue to red.

You think it's not in me?

Remember the video of the shoppers pulling each other apart beneath 50% off signs, how they trampled and hit and nearly killed one another over some phones?

And you put a gun in our hands, a bomb, a knife, and you expect compassion? You want me to go for the clean blow, to make sure there is no suffering, to not lower myself-

We are all belly-down in the mud at some point or another.

Maybe it's freedom you want, maybe it's a little glory, maybe Hyne gave you guts and nothing else.

Maybe it's about a phone.

But you'll charge the damn hill one day and you'll stick a man until he falls, and then you will kick him to make sure you finished the job.

I get ahold of one of the shovels we use to dig ourselves down into the earth and overhand it into a soldier's forehead, and his white parchment skin peels open around the sharpened edge of this shovel to sting my eyes with little red drops liks rain and he sways, he falls, he is crushed beneath my boots.

I have dropped my rifle somewhere behind me.

I fight on with this sharpened shovel, stabbing, slicing, smashing.

I lock my teeth into soft white throat skin and hold on and feel boots scrabble against my shins and cold steel press its tip against my stomach like a single lacy star of a snowflake, burning-

-and my own knife slips itself from my belt into my numb wooden hand and when I whip my head back I also push forward, through the gut, push push push, they used to tell us at boot camp- through the damn target not to-

He coughs blood into my face and folds his accordion legs into pleats beneath him, and I pull my foot back and smash the toe of my boot into his jaw as hard as I can because his central nervous system has not yet shut down, he is still reaching, weapon in hand, and I am still in range, and I kick him again, again, and he slides away down the slight rise of the hill where I stand and slithers into a pile at the bottom.

And then the next one is on me, and I turn, and stab him too.

A shovel, a hand, a knife; in here you fight with anything you've got, and you rip, you tear, you gut, until all of a man becomes nothing.

Use your fists, your feet, your teeth- what do you care you're not even human anymore- you crouch in mud up to your ankles to shit; you pick brains from underneath your fingernails; you tear through a man's flimsy tissue throat just because he was there, just because he did not move in time, just because you were never supposed to be here; you were a good kid, dammit- you were a good kid and this is not you this was never supposed to be you why didn't this stupid damn other guy stay home; why didn't he pick another way, a different path- why did he make you do this-

I push forward; my shovel rasps its sharpened tip down through soft marshmallow eyes that flex and give and burst apart; I heft it like an axe, cleave it down through the forehead, pound, hammer, nail down into their soft quicksand graves these men who are just like me, whose only mistake was to wear a different uniform.

I do this until I lose my hold on the shovel, until the sun comes out, until those of us left still standing are few, until the gas comes down like a fog through the trees.

I bed down with a dead man, breathing my stale rubber air.

We are hunched down together into the closest trench I could find, this dead man and me, and he watches me through his green glass eyes and I watch him through my blue marble own, and this fog that coils in spirals along the ground reaches one unlucky bastard who didn't get his mask secured in time, and he leans his hands down onto his knees, coughs, spits, begins to scream.

I shut my eyes.

You do not watch.

I learned that the first time.

Galbadia first issued these masks while I was on leave in Deling, and when I came back, there was my very own waiting for me, black rubber and sheer plastic, its thin elephant trunk hose swinging down loose against my arm as I picked it up for the first time, turned it over in my hands, asked Kiros what the hell it was for.

Just keep the damn thing on your belt, he told me. Don't ever take it off. He showed me how to seal it, how to lock it tight so that I inhaled only this stagnant rubber stink, and he pressed his fingers down hard into my shoulder and bored his eyes all the way through my own and again he told me, "Put it on anytime it gets misty out- as soon as it does, you got that? Don't take it off until some asshole who's spent the whole war trying to prove himself takes it off first and walks around without coughing his lungs out onto the ground."

Timber had developed this gas, he explained to me.

It didn't mean anything to me at the time. They never said anything about it in basic training; I'd never heard of any such damn thing, mist that burned each breath you took, that shoved its hot white knife down your throat and gagged you on its edge until it pried your lungs free in pieces.

But Kiros is not an idiot and I can't count the number of times his advice has saved me from a sound spanking, a grounding, and so I hooked that mask to my belt and I kept his words in the back of my mind, and the first time that fog descended through the trees I grappled it onto my face and snapped the straps down tight and all around me men fumbled to do the same, hissed their jagged exhalations into the sky and fell down screaming, and I just crouched there, the splintered lace ground beneath my boots and the gray autumn sky above my head and how do you describe something like that-

You take a thousand different nightmares and you fuse them all together, blend them so thoroughly you leap from one right into the next and from there to the one beyond, and you will advance this way through these thousand different nightmares, leaping, touching down, running on, and you will never even touch what I saw in the woods that day.

The brittle leaves on the ground snapped and popped and cracked apart beneath them, buried them in flame and cinnamon and hot paprika dust, and they just kept falling, coughing, thrashing in blind animal panic, flinging their tears and their snot and their screams, doubling over, convulsing-

The first time you watch, because you can't look away.

The second time, you pull your mask down and you tuck your face into the crook of your elbow, you breathe in sobs, because each one is your last you know it you didn't seal off that last little corner it's coming it's coming it's coming oh Hyne please please don't let it find you-

You watched their chameleon skin shudder from red to green to ash- you watched them spit up their lungs, their throats, their tongues, and don't let this happen to you too, please, Hyne-

You watched this fog that is not a fog shrivel them down into mummy remains and the sun come out to bake them into fetal figurines and this whole time you sat and you did nothing and you kept breathing this rubber and plastic reek- you just sat there -you just sat there- so much for all your damn courage-

And now?

Now that I have seen this a hundred times, a thousand, a million?

I stare up at the sky with a dead guy beside me, breathing my reptile exhalations, listening to them hiss slowly and steadily and carefully.

I thumb the grenade on my belt and I think about the guy who died for it, and how easy it is to pull a pin, to not roll away.

Your first brush with death is so new; it paints the grass emerald and the sky robin's egg and the burned sleeve of your uniform raven, and man how good does everything taste; how damn happy are you to see your home, your friends, that guy who slept in the bunk above you during basic and had this tiny little issue with bladder control.

Your thousandth takes your leaden limbs and drapes them sweatily around your gun, your knife, your bomb, because screw this waiting, you are so tired of it, dammit- you are going home one way or another, in a bag or in a box, and might as well hurry it up-

I thumb my grenade.

My mother, you see, she…she never would have wanted this for me.

She'd probably rather see me dead.

She raised a son who rescued birds and always shared his cookies at lunch and helped little old ladies across the street, and what these woods have twisted me into…she never would have wanted that.

A guy wants to be someone his mom can brag about, you know? He wants to be the guy she can point to and tell everyone, "See, that's my son, isn't he handsome; he works with impoverished cancer-stricken children and yessiree he's single why don't I just scribble down his number real quick for you."

If she was still here, if she had not left years ago, here is what she would have to say about me:

My boy Laguna killed a man today. He killed him because he was angry, because he was so tired and he wanted out and the woods are just too long, too dark, and it isn't fair; and so now because my boy Laguna was angry and tired and trapped he took a father away from his daughter, a husband from his wife, a son from his mother, and can you believe that once this boy wiped my face whenever I cried; once he raced a bird to the vet just because he couldn't stand to see it die-

I am tired, mom.

I am so tired all the damn time and why does it always have to be me who makes it through the last bombardment- that guy had a kid a goddamned kid you hear me; who's waiting for me to come home- I stabbed a guy who was already down until he quit kicking and then I pinned his friend wriggling by the throat and why do I deserve to lie here with my perfectly timed leap and my perfectly sealed mask and why the fuck didn't I just stay home, publish my first book- why didn't I give her something to look down on with a smile-

I watch the dead man and he watches me, and the fog sifts its gray ash down through the trees and onto my head and I breathe my second hand air and flick the pin of my grenade, back, forth, shift it up a little, ease it back down, and while I am staring into this dead gray sky the fog turns to snow, and now beyond the lip of the trench I hear my name, the dry crunching of those cereal leaves shattering beneath boots, the slow adhesive clearing of a throat working loose the bonds of phlegm.

I look up.

"Get out of there," Ward tells me quietly, Kiros beside him, and they both extend their hands down to me.

Up and forward.

That's the only way you come through these things.

President Deling makes his pretty little speech about justice and brighter futures and his newly appointed ambassador, and she watches the broadcast alone in her room until a woman steps up beside him at the podium, and it is that woman, painted lips and bright yellow eyes and that voice, that sharp razor hook that pulls up everything she does not want to see and brings it all screaming into bright white daytime-

She clicks off the TV.

The silence is very loud.

It's none of her business anyway, who the woman is or what Deling does with her.

Galbadia has changed their contract. The president's bodyguards are alert and in force and what happened in front of the Timber Hotel will not happen again, but it is time to clean up the streets.

Stomp until there is nothing left to flatten: this has always been Galbadia's policy.

Start killing and do not stop until you reach their leader, Martine told her two days ago over the phone: flush them out and shoot them down.

But they're just children, she thought, standing silently with that phone in her hand, watching her head in the mirror above her bed, nodding, always nodding, can't she ever do anything else-

They're just children, and maybe they hurt Zell and maybe they will shoot her first if she does not aim faster, but the one Squall left facedown in his oil slick blood was maybe her own age, maybe a little older, and he was the oldest by far, and who makes these choices anyway- who decides that Galbadia deserves this country more, who says, dammit-

Duty to your country.

Loyalty to your people.

Step out of line and they cry 'traitor', 'coward', 'turncoat'; your country has done so much for you; your government has cared so greatly and you do not just wipe your ass with this, do you hear- you do not just get up and walk away.

Someone hammers this into your head the moment you step from civilian sneakers into standard-issue boots, and this is the one thing you never forget, even as everything else frays and unravels inside of you.

Garden flaps its spider-silk ropes down into cities and towns and countrysides all over the world and reels these cobweb lines back up into her titanic metal belly and sometimes the children who are taken up these ropes are seen again, but usually they are not.

But they do try, some of them, to not be forgotten. They were drafted against their will; they owed nothing; they would not waste their childhoods inside this giant metal beast that flew in on the breeze and left their mothers weeping in the streets.

The last cadet to desert Garden just wanted to see his mother.

He didn't make it five miles into the desert.

But those cadets…they had a place to run. They had a family to not leave behind.

She never even tried.

You do not run when there are no arms waiting for you.

"Quisty!" Selphie sings from the hallway outside her room.

She tucks the loose strands of her updo carefully behind her ears.

She flattens the stray little piece of her uncooperative left eyebrow.

She begins each day like this, this careful little inspection, this smoothing over of all her flaws, and sometimes when she comes back at night there is blood to wash off her hands, and sometimes there is not, but her dreams cannot tell the difference, and they are full of red, and rhymes, and children who flop like fish in the streets.

I…shit…my head…

What's that on my face…little specks that touch my cheeks, my lids, my lips-

Snow?

My blink clears some of the fog from my head.

Not snow.

Snow is not the color of my mother's lipstick. It is not greasy, or warm, or flecked with little black threads of hair. But it falls to earth like snow. It buries the grass, and the trees, and the black-burned bodies around me.

This is snow, in war.

I remember…I remember a flash of light, and a sound to split my ears.

I remember that there used to be a guy standing next to me, rifle in hand, cigarette between his lips, and Ward, hissing at him to put the damn thing out-

And then there was a shot.

And another, and another- and I threw myself down and snapped my gun up to my shoulder, and where do I aim, I remember thinking- which direction are they coming- and then came the flash of light and the sound to split my ears and the entire earth was just…sucked away, taken out from underneath my feet, and this long long moment of nothing, of being unaware- it was the closest I have come to peace in a long time.

When I come to, the man with the rifle and the cigarette is gone, and so are Ward, and Kiros, and are they part of this snow that is not snow- is this all I have left of them, these slick little pieces that collect on my lashes and my chin-

But, no, they are here- there is Kiros' authoritative yell and Ward's booming command and I sit up, I shoulder my rifle, I aim into the woods-

The man with the rifle and the cigarette is limbless at my feet- his eyes stare but they do not see.

This is the other thing about war, how callous it makes you. That guy had a wife who was carrying his first son, and all I can do is lie here, and thank Hyne that it wasn't Ward, or Kiros, or me.

I am grateful this man is dead. I am glad his wife will wait for him in vain.

This is what war does, to nice boys who used to save birds and hand-draw Valentines and wipe their mother's cheeks.

The voice started up three nights ago.

Sometimes it is Matron's and sometimes it is not.

He lies awake.

He stares at the ceiling and he thinks about how goddamned cold the sheets are, and how she lies asleep in her own bed two doors down, and once, you know, his sheets weren't always this way-

But what a long, long fucking time ago that was.

The graveyard, the voice that is maybe Matron's and maybe not reminds him.

The graveyard and what mommy dearest did to you there and how those faces watching from their perches on the wrought-iron fence fucking laughed and laughed, and wouldn't shut up- all that goddamned noise-

He dug his shovel down deep into the earth with her rag-wrapped corpse beside him, such a tiny fucking doll thing, that rag-wrapped corpse, and he dug, he dug, he fucking dug so goddamned hard, but he never cleared that grave, he always had to start over- how many goddamned times did he try to bury her-

Not good enough, boy, she told him. Try again. Do better.

Stop failing.

Kiss the girl good-night and watch out for the worms, boys- the worms went in the worms went out they'll turn your stomach slimy green until pus pours out like whipping cream-

In Deling City there is a carnival that comes once a year.

Usually it shows up right around Halloween, and offers reduced admission to children wrapped in their ghost sheets and their rubber masks, and Kiros and I, every year without fail, we showed up with our costumes and our five carefully-saved gil in sweating hands, and we ran rampant through those tents.

You can bet they earned the hell out of that ten gil.

My favorite was always this one room, this red, red room with a clicking old projector that cast its flickering images all around the walls, that put you right there on a distant red planet with the red dust beneath your feet and the stars above your head and the alien cities with their floating palaces and their wine-colored rivers and the musicians playing their strange extraterrestrial instruments.

You could sit there for a thousand years, and never take it in long enough.

Kiros always liked the Maze of Mirrors, but this room had so many secrets- you ran to meet those musicians playing their strange extraterrestrial instruments and by the time you reached them they were suddenly women floating in their veil clouds, whirling, dipping, spinning past like ballerinas; and when you reached out to graze one of those long lacy banners streaming in the dry alien wind- it melted away beneath your fingertips, it stretched, it flowed- it was suddenly a field of glass flowers that chimed like bells against one another in the wind. And you bent down to pick a flower and their stems sprouted into towering redwood trees, and ahead of you danced these little constellations of fairy light, and little shadows that darted between the trunks, animals and little purple-skinned dwarves and oakwood women with their waving moss hair-

I loved that room.

From the moment when the first of our neighbors began to put pumpkins in their windows and witches on their front porches, I sat at my window, and I watched, waiting for that circus to roll into town.

This year it's under new management, and it came a month later than usual, and it is still here two months after it arrived, when Kiros and Ward and I are all home on leave.

For old time's sake, Kiros tells me with a smile.

Damned kid still can't get over that Maze of Mirrors. I think he just likes to look at himself that much.

So I pay my money -ten gil, this year- and I step into that room and I stand there in the shuddering candle flame light of that projector, watching the red planet come to life all around me, and I feel…I feel so empty.

It's not the same. And it's not because I am older, I don't believe anymore, I am not filled with awe, watching the dancers and the musicians and the flowing red-wine rivers-

I was once a boy, standing in this redwood forest. I was once a boy who had not killed men and lost friends and wrote letters home to mothers whose sons would not be making it back, and it hurts.

That's what always comes after the emptiness: the sensation of being stuffed, of overflowing, of being just too damn small to contain everything you feel.

The dancers trail their veils past my nose, hide their kohl-smudged eyes away behind painted fans, and then the musicians sound their funny little wooden flutes, and ten-year-old Laguna- he's in here somewhere, and he wants out, he wants to look, to touch, to run, and I'm too old, too tired, too full.

I am twenty-six, and I am too old for carnivals.

And maybe you are too, and maybe you're proud of this, of growing up, of moving beyond- but what I would give, to have that kid back.

When he can't sleep, he turns to his sketchpad and his charcoal.

They are tucked carefully away beneath his extra clothes and his knives and the old oil rag he swiped from Garden's garage to keep Hyperion pretty in between stabbings, because this is strictly the kind of shit you keep to yourself.

In Balamb the other kids didn't give two flying fucks about him, and he discovered what a pencil can do, the way it transports you, in between all his pretending to not give a shit.

He wasn't half fucking bad at it.

He used to sit up at night, sometimes just aimlessly scribbling, seeing what emerged out of all that black, sometimes trying to capture a bird, a flower he'd seen that day, the patterns the clouds shaped themselves into outside his window- and stupid little shit that he was, he used to pretend all this black was a portal, another dimension, a door he could step through and swing shut and never look back on. This portal would carry him away, take him home, and maybe she could go with him- maybe her stupid shitty parents who couldn't even recognize what they goddamned had could just go fuck themselves and she'd leave them both, she'd follow behind with a smile, back to Matron, to Cid, to Irvine and Sis and Zell and even Selphie and Squall.

Maybe she'd never leave him again, in this other dimension.

Maybe Matron would still love him.

Maybe, maybe, maybe: what a bunch of shitty little possibilities he stored up inside of himself back then, so goddamned hopefully.

But he escaped through that sketchpad.

He didn't have anywhere else to run, after Zell left him for Garden.

And you know, there was a kind of magic there, in the way he could conjure whole worlds from a smudge here, a streak there, and it reminded him of Matron reading to them before bed, of the way she could so totally fucking transport him, with just a few words.

He's too old now, and the magic is gone, but it's still a nice goddamned thought, this stepping through to the other side.

She tosses and she turns and she cannot get back to sleep.

She can't stop thinking about that small little ball of a bird, on the sand between them.

And the way he treated her-

She has never been told that it is all right to grieve, it is ok to feel, and this man, this crude, crude man who kills too well, who has set foot inside Garden's library exactly three times, who hurts because he can-

He wiped her face. He sat there beside her on that burning yellow dune until Garden came to take him away, and he let her mourn.

How much is she forgetting?

She has tried so hard to let that tire swing go, to wipe it away, smudge it out, but it will not leave, it keeps poking its fragmented little pieces up through her memories and into her dreams and why would she have let him touch her that way- why would she have held him back-

She kicks off her covers.

She flips her pillow.

Two doors down, he sleeps, perhaps in his standard-issue sweatpants and his standard-issue shirt, and perhaps in nothing, and oh dear sweet Hyne, how can she think that?

All right.

Sometimes, when he is not being utterly horrible, she wonders what he looks like beneath his uniform. Just a brief little flash of curiosity, mind you, because his shoulders are so very broad and his arms are so very…accentuated, and he knows this and so everyone else knows it as well, and why shouldn't she have pondered what the rest of him looks like, every so once in a blue moon?

She glares up at the ceiling.

She really must have something better to contemplate, this late at night.

She flips her pillow back over.

She yanks her covers up to her chin.

She shuts her eyes, and there are the boy and the bird, waiting for her, and that tire swing held suspended in his flawless young hands, and scattered across his face is just the lightest frosting of blonde stubble that scrapes her face as he leans in to kiss her-

His hands were not so flawless, when he wiped her face as they sat together on that dune; Garden had already begun to whittle its imperfections into him.

But they were warm hands, and they were gentle, and she tried not to like the way they felt against her cheeks, and if she gropes down through the fog that still obscures all the memories surrounding this one lone recollection that stands out like an island in the mist-

She remembers the way his smile felt, how it stiff-armed her in the gut.

Once Garden dropped her off in the desert with only this one lone bird for her companion, and when they ordered her to kill this one lone companion of hers, she stroked the downy tuft of its little head as it looked up at her, beak open, waiting for its next meal, its latest coo of affection, and she snapped its neck.

To make her tough, Garden said.

To shape her into something better.

To make her see: there is no attachment; there is no love; there is no compassion.

Not when you have been designed to take away.

This is what she does, little Quistis Marae Trepe, who must have once played with dolls and colored outside the lines and danced without understanding how to shape her body through counts of eight: she takes, she breaks, she destroys.

She cried for so long, holding that little mangled body.

And then over the crest of a hill came Seifer Almasy, mean, barbaric Seifer Almasy, who kicked the back of her chair in class, who flicked pencil shavings in her hair and got her in trouble during tests and followed her down the hall to gym each day, imitating the way she walked, and he sat down next to her and clumsily offered her his own bird, and for several eternal moments, she could only look at him.

And he smiled. The sun came out on his face. She had noticed this before, how bright his face shone when he relaxed out of his scowl, his smirk, but how it stuttered her heart, to have it aimed at her: how her pulse became this little hiccupping machine gun inside her, the way it skipped-

They came to take him away minutes later, because the whole point was to isolate each student with this one lone companion, and he had ruined it all; they nearly failed her as well, until they saw that little twisted corpse in the dust at her feet.

He complained the whole way back to the truck, had the actual gall to tell one of the instructors to shut up, pointed out that he was already on probation and what exactly else could they do to him, and then he looked back over his shoulder, and he winked.

She has never known exactly what to make of him.

Last year on her birthday he broke into the cafeteria and stole a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream, her favorite, and even though she threatened, she pleaded, she insisted he put it back, he somehow persuaded her to help him eat the whole thing, outside in the quad after curfew.

Twice the patrols swept the beams of their lights in little searching white fingers over the bench he had commandeered while they lay huddled shoulder to shoulder underneath it, he laughing into the crook of his arm, she utterly terrified -the marks this was going to put on her record!- and afterward he just rolled right out from beneath that bench and told her to take the stick from her ass, and jammed another spoonful into her mouth when she opened it to explain to him precisely where it was she was going to transfer that stick.

The next day, he doodled anatomically-correct men all over the screen of her classroom computer, and got her three days detention.

And he winked in exactly the same way, and put his feet up on his desk, and for so long she pondered whether it was worth the extra day of detention, to jam her pen through his eye.

The moon paints its bright white searchlight over her bed, and she kicks off her covers.

She flips her pillow, once, again, again.

At the back of the hotel is a little patch of grass which has not yet died, and this is where she lies down to watch the stars, hugging her coat around her.

Her razor breath cuts up her throat and scores her lungs, but she doesn't mind.

This is being alive, this way winter forces its knives between her lips and down into her chest.

She blows long puffs of cigarette exhalations into the sky.

All around her, the world lies quiet in its winter grave, powdered white, tinted brown.

The stars are so clear, from here.

It was Irvine who taught her how to trace their forms, how to piece them together into big dippers and fish hooks and northern crosses, and maybe it is the way she thinks about him now that conjures him out of the arctic air, rifle over his shoulder.

"Kinda' early to be out here, ain't it?"

She smiles and crosses her boots at the ankles. "It's quiet. It's nice."

"You mean, Dincht ain't here and Seifer ain't awake yet." He settles down beside her on the grass, laying Exeter across his thighs.

"What are you doing up so early?" she asks him as he eases back next to her in the grass, folding one arm behind his head.

"Ah, couldn't sleep. Been thinking. Know I don't need to do that, face as pretty as mine, but can't help it sometimes."

She smiles again, and for several long minutes, they lie together in the grass, not speaking, breathing their soft cotton breaths, and these are the moments she would like to freeze, to keep forever, these in-between minutes where there are no bombs or bullets or skies raining death.

This is what it must be like, to live on the other side. To live, period.

She has only ever practiced dying.

"Quisty," he says quietly, drawing out the syllables of her name, blowing them in overlapping rings up toward the stars.

She turns her face cheek down into the grass to look at him. "Mmm?"

"That Laguna guy…" he trails off, folds his other arm up behind his head, starts again. "You ever…you ever feel the way he does sometimes?"

To hope in vain, to feel the weight of all her years set like lead-weight hands on her chest-

She understands.

Once she was a girl, and she tries so very very hard to forget this, but maybe once she too enjoyed carnivals- maybe once she visited the red red room and its chiming bell-glass flowers and its towering alien cities and maybe she could think of nothing worse than letting this all go, of stepping back beyond the tent flap.

Maybe once she ran just to run, without worrying about infractions or propriety or discipline.

"I was a nice kid too, you know, just like him," he says, and she doesn't ask him how he knows this, how he remembers.

"I know," she says softly.

He blows more of those overlapping rings up toward the stars. "I remember this one kid in weapons class…he found out his friend was just killed on a mission while we were sparring. They made the announcement right as I hit the guy in the face…and he just collapsed. Thought at first I hit him too hard, but then he just started sobbing, and I knew I hadn't hit him that hard, and I realized that it wasn't me at all, it was that announcement, and all I could do was stand there, trying to figure out what the hell to do, and he just…he kept crying. Snot runnin' everywhere, drool- everything just came pouring out of this kid. You're not supposed to care that much, course, so they took him away. They sent him out into the desert to fight monsters for a week, and I don't know what else they did to him, but I never saw him cry again, not even when this other kid I always saw him hanging around in the cafeteria keeled over in the library one day from some rare reaction to the Guardian Force he'd junctioned." He swallows, works his arms beneath his head. She watches him flex his fingers, fold them down into fists. "And you know…sometimes I'm so scared, because if I lost either one of those assholes, I'd lose my shit too. And then they'd take me away. And I don't want them to remake me, Quisty. Maybe I think too much before I pull the trigger and maybe I wanna' puke, watchin' all those videos they make us sit through, but if they take that away, I've got nothin' left. That kid's dead." His voice cracks very slightly.

She wonders if she has ever had one of those children inside of her. Is there some other Quistis curled up within her, who loves without fear and lives without boundaries, who paints herself into other watercolor lives, who writes herself into new worlds?

She would like to meet that Quistis.

She would like to curl up inside her, for just one day.

She looks up into the sky.

"I don't think that will ever happen to you, Irvine."

He breathes quietly in and out. "It's what they do, Quistis. They stomp until we're flat."

But they have stomped, and stomped, and they have never crushed him down.

They have never ironed him smooth.

"I still think you're that boy, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes," she tells him quietly. "I think you will never stop caring. And I think…I think that's nice."

She listens to him breathing, hears the soft dry whispering of him turning his head to look across the grass toward her. "The thing about Laguna, whoever he is, is that he still cares. He never stops caring, through everything he does. If he did, it wouldn't hurt so much."

And the thing about hurting-

It's how you know you are still alive. When life has burned you to a third degree crispness, when you see but do not feel- that's what Garden is trying to accomplish. A perfect soldier obeys without question; a perfect soldier kills without compunction.

She has mastered all the steps, but she has never really learned the dance, the way it flows together, how one part ripples seamlessly into the next and the next beyond that.

She wears the mask, but it itches, it sticks to her sweating skin, it makes her feel too hot, too stifled, too uncomfortable.

But she never takes it off.

Garden took her in when the parents she cannot remember didn't want her, and Garden wants her to wear this mask until she becomes it, to dance this dance until she is no longer a separate entity, until its rhythm is her body or her body is its rhythm.

She tries, because if she can't be loved, she can at least be accomplished.

Quistis Trepe conquered Blue Magic in two years; Quistis Trepe made SeeD in four; Quistis Trepe gets the job done; Quistis Trepe never turns down a mission.

Quistis Trepe has no lover, no mother, no brother.

She has a tidy closet, and an organized desk, and shoes stacked in color-coordinated rows.

She has a memory of a boy who felt something for her once, who liked the way she was before.

Sometimes memories, they make such a knot in your throat.

They tie themselves so tightly up inside you that it is a struggle just to breathe past them, and this is what she does now, carefully, working the sharp winter air slowly down past this lump.

She wanted to forget the swing, and his hands, and the smell of summer and the taste of root beer. She wanted so badly to pretend this was merely a figment of her imagination, that she never existed before Garden, that she never had anything before Garden, but she remembers, and maybe she can forget again one day, but not this day.

Once upon a time, a boy kissed her.

A boy held her face like it was fragile glass beneath his fingers, that precious, and maybe it was just Seifer Almasy, maybe it was just a fleeting moment, or a dare, but he held her and she gripped him back and they shared one breath, and to be that close to someone, without a garrote around their throat-

She shuts her eyes.

She was once a girl who had not killed men and lost friends and written names in notebooks.

"You cold?" he asks softly, and she opens her eyes just a sliver.

He smiles and holds open his duster, and she inches her way across the grass toward him, to be enfolded away inside this familiar coat with him lying warm beside her.

He tucks his arm beneath her head.

It is so quiet, and the stars are so clear.

And wrapped in him, in this familiar coat, she thinks that this family that does not call, that dropped her off in Garden's polished halls to die young-

They can go to hell.

He points toward the sky with his free arm. "There's 'Pubic', according to Dincht."

"Puppis?"

"Yeah, the idiot never gets it right, so eventually one day I just gave up on correcting him. Think he probably does it on purpose. Kinda' embarrassing though, when your friend's telling all the guys in the locker room about how you showed him the pubic part of the sky. Think he regretted it, though, when Seifer asked him if 'sky' was a nickname for my asshole, and the pubic part was his. That's when they got into it and ended up crashing through the locker room door out into the hallway-"

"And I showed up to see what all the noise was, right about when Seifer was trying to bounce Zell's head off the wall and Zell reached back for some leverage, and came away with Seifer's towel in his hand."

His arm bounces beneath her as he laughs. "And instead a' bookin' it back into the locker room, like any normal man with any humility would have, he just stood there and kept trying to bounce Dincht's head off the wall, while Dincht screamed like a little girl and announced to the whole hallway that Seifer's wang was about to touch him and he'd give anyone who helped him thirty gil-forty for assisted suicide, in the instance that Seifer's wang did touch him. Poor guy. Martial artist expert or not, kinda' hard to fight off a naked guy. Hard to work your techniques when you're doing everything you can not to touch the guy."

"And then Seifer turned around and saw me standing there with my mouth hanging open and took my phone out of my hand and snapped a picture. He said it would last longer."

"Well, in his defense, you were the one with your phone already out, Quisty."

"I was already talking to someone on it when I came to see what was going on!"

She can hear the smile in his voice. "So did you keep the picture?"

"No!"

"I think you're blushin'."

She is most certainly not. "I didn't even look at it. I deleted it as soon as he handed me my phone back."

"How many other students at Garden do you think have had to scrub the cafeteria floors for flashin' their dong in public?"

She rolls her eyes. "He didn't even do it. I caught him blackmailing Zell into doing it for him. I don't know what he had on him, but most of his punishment consisted of him sitting on one of the tables smirking while poor Zell cleaned the whole building."

His arm bounces beneath her again.

For a long moment they lie staring at the sky, and it is amazing, how much heat a human body can hold, how much warmer she feels here, on this stiff winter ground, than she ever did tossing and turning in her plush chocobo-feather bed.

"Seifer ain't so bad," Irvine says, tipping his head down to rest the brim of his hat against her cheek. "He only picks on the people he likes, you know."

"Then he must be madly in love with me," she says dryly.

The smile is still in his voice.

"Must be."

Writing is a thing to break a dam.

I leave the carnival for the house that used to belong to my mom, and for the longest time I sit at the empty kitchen table, pen in hand, boots up (she woulda' killed me for that, once), and what I start out writing on this little yellow legal pad I found in one of the kitchen drawers is just a simple little love story, the oldest tale man has ever told: Boy meets girl, is overwhelmed by her charms, trips over his own damn feet trying to impress her.

You can guess what the girl does for a living, and the name the boy stammers out before fleeing back to his regular table and his laughing asshole friends.

And this is where I put my pen down.

I have never stopped thinking about Julia, not every moment I get just a quiet second to myself, a microscopic minute in which I am not remembering how to live.

But love…

How can a man like me love, when I have done the things I've done? You can't…you can't just pound your rifle all the way through a man's skull until you reach his brain, and then go home and hold some woman in your arms. You can't stroke her hair and kiss her neck and really let yourself feel, when the boots you left behind next to the front door are still caked with all the little pieces of this skull you hammered your rifle all the way through.

Write what you know, right?

So I start over.

I tell about a boy who left home with a rifle over his shoulder, who was full of so many good things when he joined up.

His first firefight: the bright orange stars of the muzzle flares and the way he crouched down in his hole, so damn scared, how he just wanted to go home, to see his mom, to sit at his desk with his pencil and his imagination and his innocence.

The first time he ever killed a man. Not with some sights between him and his target, not with a hundred yards between them, too far to feel the backsplash, too far to smell the man's shit dripping down his ankles, but man to man: hand to hand.

He took a knife, and he pushed it in to the hilt.

Imagine that: the elastic skin, stretching around this blade you push in to the hilt, the way it gives, stretches, and the guy flails, tries to push you away, speaks in tiny red spit bubbles that smear themselves down your cheeks, your nose, you are that close. You smell his coffee breath and his unwashed uniform and you're too scared to push that blade in farther, you're too scared to not push that blade in farther, because what if he finishes you first- what if there is still enough left in him to draw his own knife, to stick it between your ribs- what if it finds your heart and you never see your mom again- what if they take you home in one of those long horrible boxes with their folded wax dolls-

And now you pull your knife, and you stick him again, again, again, you just keep hacking- you're not behind this at all anymore, it's not you how could it be you-

But it is, dammit, it's your hands plunging the knife and your heart still beating and your cheeks feeling the stinging needle droplets of all this blood you take, but if it wasn't him it was you, can you understand that, mom? Can you please try to understand that- can you still love your son with the pieces of skull on his boots and the blood in dry brown half-moons under his fingernails and the little red raindrops he can never quite scrub out of his stubble-

And the dam breaks.

They never go quietly, do they?

I lay my head down on the table and cry for so damn long, in this house that used to belong to my mom.

She was proud of me.

She was proud of me and I've given away everything she had to brag about.

Deep breaths, Zone.

No one is going to recognize you, Zone.

He keeps his hat pulled low and his eyes down, and he walks with his hands in his pockets toward the train station.

His stomach.

You just go forward, Watts used to tell him.

That was when he was still here to walk beside him, to not let him go alone.

Oh Hyne, oh Hyne, breathe-

He's clinging by a thread here, Watts, man.

Freedom…it's so pricey.

How far are you willing to go for it? Watts used to ask them. Our fathers fought, and we carry on, and how long are we going to keep doing this- do we pass this revolution along to our kids, our grandkids, to their grandkids- do we give up, because we are tired, because we have been fighting for so long, and we want to go back to our 40" TVs and our gaming systems and our school dances?

No, he told them.

Not me.

We are still here, because we're doing something right. And if we don't let go, if we keep pushing, if we never stop- one day we're going to roll right over them. And I hope it's before my kids have to pick up a gun, and I hope it's before your kids learn how to trigger a car bomb, but we'll never know, if we don't try.

Not me either, he decided. This is my town and they can't have it, and I will always fight, I will never stop.

And then they heaved Watts' body from the train and dumped him like trash in the woods and he stopped knowing why it was worth it.

He remembered his empty home, and his girlfriend's sightless staring eyes, and the way Watts picked him up from these tragedies and brushed him off and never let him look back.

And now he walks past the soldiers alone. He takes their drill bit eyes through the gut without Watts' friendly smile to throw them off, and his water knees tremble so hard he can barely hold himself up, and why -that's all he wants to know- how come, you son of a bitch?

There is only one figure still left on the platform, silhouetted in sunset, bag at her feet, and as he threads his way so carefully -Hyne, please don't let them know- between those soldiers, flexing his sweaty shaking hands inside his pockets, she turns to him, and she smiles.

She picks up her bag.

He waits until he has glued his voice back together along the seams.

"Are you Rinoa?"

A/N: There really is a video of people going apeshit over some phones. It was taken at a Wal-Mart, in which state I can't remember, but it was during Black Friday and it was utterly nuts the way these people went at each other. It's pretty frightening how something like a big sale on phones, of all things, can reduce human beings to animals.

The red carnival room was inspired by Bradbury's image of Mars in 'The Martian Chronicles', or at least the city and the river and the instruments were. The rest is just random stuff from my brain.

Also, we'll see Laguna return to being an awkward loveable goofball at some point, but the boy's got some issues to work out right now. His battle scenes are based on the trench warfare of WWI.