He felt old. Old and tired.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. I'm sorry commander. We tried to send someone in again but…At least they came back alive this time."

Squall pounded his fist on the desk in frustration and anger. "God damn it!" he stood with effort. He'd stayed on the crutches for all of one day before throwing them off and standing on his own, no matter it felt like his joints were burning whenever he walked across the room. He wanted- no, needed some reminder of her. If this was all she had left him with, so be it. "If only we could get someone inside!"

Months. Mere months since this entire mess had started, not even a particularly long measurement of time, but to Squall they felt like years. When he had been young the days had flown past. When he had been a SeeD they had vanished into the past like lightning as he had trained and trained until his body was steel and his mind tuned into a finely-calibrated machine. Finally the Second War had ended and those months had slipped away from him as he and Rinoa had looked forward to their life together and had walked towards it without fear. Now those forgotten and pushed-aside months had come back and stacked themselves on top of him one after another, and as if in vengeance for his not noticing them before the days crawled past at a snail's pace.

Nothing on Xu except worrying reports of a trail of bodies, congregations visited in the night and the men of the white armbands found dead in alleys. She was blazing a trail of corpses, its path erratic as it deviated to pass through villages and towns touched by the Cultists, leaving them coated in red. Squall knew where was she going, but he knew he had no chance of getting in her way. He knew her well, but she knew him better. She wasn't going to be found.

Letters out of Dollet from Fujin and the others, a clear ray of hope in a confusing fog. Rumours and apocrypha and more from the silent SeeD and her cohorts as they collected as much information as they could and sent it along just as fast. The city belonged to the man Aimsland now, that much was clear. Squall had sighed when he had read Zell's half-embarrassed half-professional summary of his and Nida's little escapade and his reply had been short and to the point. The four of them were the sole sources of information they had from the coastal city and he didn't want them risking themselves. They had two missions and two missions only, and neither involved combat of any sort; find information on anything they could and get that information to the outside. No combat allowed. Squall had written that order himself and made damn sure it was underlined twice. He knew he should have worried about it more. Knew he should be keeping a closer eye on the city, but Rinoa's absence left a hole that seemed to have erased them. He'd woken up from his half-sleep half-coma she had put him in and seen Seifer's eyes and knew without being told what had happened, and as his blonde nemesis had said the words some emotional core had been ripped out. He felt like a machine with half its brain shut down, reduced to simply collating data and recording events and facts as they happened around him.

Recorded: Dollet had been taken over by rabid Sorceress Cultists and Quistis Trepe, the nearest thing he had to an older sister and a woman he had fought and bled alongside for years, had been swallowed into a black hole that no information escaped from. Wherever she was now she was in God's hands, if Hyne truly listened to His creations.

Recorded: Rinoa, his own wife, had left him behind with a flash of white through his eyes and one final memory of lips against his cheek. He had no idea where she was, or what she was doing.

Recorded: Xu Tyynes, the rock on which Balamb Garden anchored itself, had slaughtered the Galbadian generals and vanished into the night. Reports came in of bodies in the streets and towns between Deling and Dollet, the men of the white armbands waking in the morning to find their congregations short by one member as a vengeful geist passed through them and took lives as easily as snuffing a candle. She would not be caught.

The man was still looking at him and he waved him away. "Thanks. That'll be all." The man left soundlessly, and as the door swung open and shut he caught a flash of white from the other side, and a half-whispered conversation.

"…still like a lost puppy…?"

"…not...place to say, sir."

"I'll deal with it."

This last came through loud and clear as the door flew open again and Seifer strode into the room. Caraway had used it as a study and Squall was putting it to much the same use, papers strewn across half the surfaces. The walls were soundproof or nearly so, and he had taken to it just to get away from the bustle of the mansion. He knew that Selphie and Irvine meant well but no matter how hard they tried it seemed he was immune to their enthusiasm. "What now?"

Seifer stared at Squall. It only flicked across his eyes for a second but was it disgust that he'd just seen in the blonde man's eyes. "So you're still here? Why?"

"Where else would I be?" He didn't want to deal with this. The steady attenuation of personnel had withered the original staff of the mansion down and down as people quit or were rotated out and not replaced. More and more it seemed as though Squall and the others were stuck in a mansion with some silent and perfect spirit that swept away his men one by one. Sometimes he'd found himself talking to Seifer solely because there were so few people left in it. But not today. "I'm busy with-"

"You're busy with crap." Calmly and with no change of his expression Seifer swept a hand across the desk Squall sat at, sending papers and ornaments crashing to the ground. "I asked why you were still here. In Deling."

"I have work to do. I-"

Seifer sighed in exasperation. "I swear to God they only make you SeeDs if they know you have issues." He planted his hands on the desk and leaned closer to Squall. "Your wife's out there missing and you're sat here still looking for some kind of answer to all this shit? While you wife is missing?"

Maybe in the past he would have smirked, or something equally childish. It was no secret to anyone what Seifer thought about Rinoa. Stories had been written about it for years. In an earlier time he would have been angry, or maybe pitying, as he saw that small flame flare up again, the one Seifer Almasy seemed to refuse to let go. The last remnant of the man's dream. "The hell do you think I should do? Walk out there and start asking the entire city whether they've seen a woman walking around with wings on her back? I-"

Seifer slapped him.

It wasn't hard, or particularly full of malice, but it shocked him as the man's glove went across his face. He was too surprised to react, or even hit back. He just sat there as Seifer stood up straight, and the look in his eyes was something Squall didn't want to see.

"I lost to this? No wonder she left you behind. She took the best parts with her, didn't even need the rest."

He snapped and stood up, body working on autopilot as all that old anger and hatred boiled back up out of the box he'd forced it into after the War had ended. It's over, we won, I beat him. She loves me, not you. But some small part of him had always wondered. "The hell do you want Seifer?"

"What do I want? I want to get out of this godforsaken city and go back to something approaching a normal life. Loire offered me a line out of this mess and I'll be damned if you screw it up for me." He tossed down something and it made a ping against the desk. Squall picked it up and examined it, the metal catching the light as it did so. It was a Cultist pendant, a crude circle of beaten copper with a rough approximation of a pair of wings inside it. Seifer went on. "We got this from one of the bases Irvine was looking through after Xu's little lab of horrors. He found it today. The man wearing it told us some pretty interesting things when we caught him." Squall remembered something someone had told him, what seemed like an age ago:

...congregation retreated into the tunnels under Galbadia. We-

Seifer leaned back down again and there was fire in his eyes. "I want you to wake up from your little pity party and come with me and the damned cowboy, when we go set their little hidey-hole on fire and see what scuttles out." He turned to leave, only pausing at the door. "She wouldn't want this Squall, and we both know it."

Squall stared at the closed door, fingers idly tracing the shape of the cultist pendant. Finally he came to a decision and stood. The case still stood against the wall and as he unsnapped the latches he shook his head at what the other man had told him. He was worried that there was nothing he could do, that she didn't need him. If she had asked he would have left the city with her and she knew it. Why did she leave him behind then? There would always be a part of Rinoa's soul that would be beyond him, even as her Knight. He had glimpsed it in Ultimecia's castle during the war, and he has seen it only a few times since then. The sheer power and enjoyment of the Sorceress within her. Not his angel, but theirs. He was worried that he would go and find her and she would look at him and simply say I don't need you to complete me anymore. It was selfish and petty but he knew it was there. Suddenly Squall looked and saw himself as Seifer must have done.

So be it. Doesn't matter if I'll be her knight or her servant. At least we'll be together.

He swung the door open that led outside to the car, to find someone already there waiting for him.

Seifer grinned. "Don't you hate it when I'm right?"

"Shut up."

It really was a hole. In another age it might have been used as an escape route should Deling ever be threatened with invasion, or to store supplies in case of bombardment. Now it was used as a HQ for fanatics. Squall shone his torch down and the beam only made it a few dozen yards before it was swallowed, and black nothing stared back at him. They'd pushed their way through an empty warehouse to find it, old machinery and other discarded material hiding it well enough for the casual inspector to turn away in disgust, but if you already knew it was there you could see the places where junk had been piled just so to form a path through the squat building, to the trapdoor in the ground, and the painted symbol on the wall.

Irvine snorted in amusement as he and Selphie stared down. Both of them were filthy from just finding the place. "First labs now this? What else is buried here?"

Seifer shrugged. "Deling's like a sewer, all the shit flows underground eventually." He checked his watch. "According to our little friend-" Squall had met the friend. He had been a scared young man utterly intimidated by Seifer's anger, and had given up without a struggle, "-we have a few hours before they wonder where he is, so I suggest we get to work."

Squall shifted the dagger on his belt. There was no way he'd be able to swing the Lionheart within the confines of those tunnels. Unlike his own blade there was nothing pristine about it; it was crude and sharp. It would do. Before he could find a reason not to he walked past Seifer and descended down into the darkness.

It was nothing like he had expected. He brushed a hand across the wall and it came away free of dust or anything else. A few steps in and the ground below him solidified from loose dirt into a hard-packed well-worn path, and eventually he realised that there was no reason to stoop, because the ceiling was high enough to stand.

They're well-organised enough to get this done? This wasn't just some cultist bolt-hole. He heard Seifer whistle behind him as the man realised the same thing, and the two shared a look before travelling further in. The floor sloped gently and he could feel the pressure above him increase as they went deeper into Deling's underside. Squall played his torch from side to side and for a moment didn't realise what he was seeing, until Seifer spoke up in a hushed whisper as his own light moved over the same carved brick that had been roughly shoved and hammered into the dirt wall.

"These people don't fuck around," Seifer said with faint admiration, as the word Sleeping Quarters carved into the brick was lit up. "What do you think?

Do they have a complex down here, entirely in the dark? How do these people live? I'd go insane from a day of this and they have enough traffic to put up goddamn signposts?

"Who's there?"

At the same moment the voice came out of the darkness ahead of them, some instinctual telepathy flew between Squall and Seifer as without speaking they both switched off their torches at the same moment. They were plunged into darkness and for a moment all Squall could hear was the blood roaring through his ears. Luckily for his own sanity the silence didn't press upon them for long, as down the tunnel a beam of light rounded a corner and bobbed towards them. Squall felt wind moving past his shoulder and was too late to stop Seifer, as for a moment a black outline occluded the light of the new arrival. There was a cut-off choking gasp and the light swung wildly from one side to another, and finally a foot came crashing down on it, and the only sound was Seifer's voice.

"Don't try and speak or cry out or I'll cut your throat. Understand me?" There must have been some nod in the darkness because Seifer went on. "We want information, and we're looking for someone informed. Right now that's you. Unless you give me someone higher up your little cultist chain of command, you're it. Do you understand?" For his own part Squall must have been utterly convinced. The man must have been too, because Seifer reacted to something Squall couldn't see. "Good. Thank you for your cooperation. This won't hurt. Much." A dull thump, and then there was nothing.

Squall risked turning his flashlight back to, and found Seifer dusting off his hands. ON the ground lay the unfortunate victim of his questioning. He held the beam on the man for a moment, enough to make sure he was still breathing. "Did you really need to-"

"Yes," Seifer cut him off. He tipped his head and Squall heard the same thing he did; the sound of footsteps echoing across a narrow space. "Shit." He turned back to look him in the eye. "This is the best shot we have at finding where Rinoa went. God knows I could think of a thousand better places to be than down a hole with your insecure ass but we need to get this done while we can. Are you with me?" Before Squall could say anything more the other man had already disappeared into the shadows.

With little choice, he followed him down.

The hours went past in a blur of half-remembered attacks and flashes as they fought and sneaked their way through what seemed like miles of tunnels and rooms. They'd push through dirt for minutes and then step out of a gap in the wall into a well-lit room that could have been from any cheap barracks on the surface. He tried to keep some sort of map in his head but it quickly fell apart, and as best either of them could tell they were blazing a path across half the city. The tunnels must have been dug between basements and storage-rooms already in the city, forgotten by anyone else. By the time they had gone half a mile – or maybe more – they knew that people were already alerted and hunting for them. Squall only hoped Selphie and Irvine had managed to get something in place on the surface already.

The man struck out with the makeshift weapon, a simple knife duct-taped to a broomstick, and he grabbed the wooden handle as it went past and pulled, his elbow already coming up as the man lost his balance and careened towards him. Bone met bone and he dropped like a light. Squall winced as his joints protested at their rough treatment, but he was already moving out of the dirt and into the light of the next identical square box of their trip.

"God, that was a long one." Seifer spat blood, the result of an unlucky (or lucky, depending on your point of view) strike from a man who had been a little quicker than his fellows. He'd paid for his hit though, laid out somewhere in the tunnels alongside the others. "We must be getting closer."

Seifer's interrogation technique was crude but unreliably effective. Whatever backbone the cultists had melted swiftly under it, and names had given up other names until finally they had come to the end of the human information chain. The man had been half-terrified out of his skull, and covered in dirt from where he had been trying to tunnel through the walls to get away from them. Seifer had grabbed him by the collar and thrown him down, but it had been Squall that had recognised him.

You!

You know this guy? Seifer had asked, when the man had collapsed to Squall's knee and begged.

The man who had approached them in Dollet looked up into the two faces of the SeeD and his ally and seen no pity there. The poise and smug arrogance were gone now, replaced by abject terror. Not so confident now, that he didn't have the upper hand. Squall had felt rage course through his veins and one hand was already on his knife when Seifer had roughly pushed him away, kneeling down to look into the man's face.

Seems you have a little history with my friend here. You answer my questions and maybe I won't leave you alone here with him.

He had nodded pathetically and spilled his guts. She…the archangel was here. Squall's stomach lurched at the thought of Rinoa down in this maze of darkness. She came to us, I took…we took her down here and showed her how we worshipped her…her kind. She…she wanted to meet the other cultists, and she was only here for a few hours I swear to the Archangel I'm not lying! She asked some questions about the Faithful and then she left us. I swear to Her I don't know where she went! Some people left with us, they went…I forget! I swear to Hyne I'm not lying!

And all these gun you're hiding down here? Are those for the rats?

We…we were going to drive you…drive SeeD out of the city. Make it holy again like Dollet, for when She returned to us. We need to cleanse…cleanse the world of evil for the Resurrection.

Seifer spoke a word at a time. Where. Did. She. Go.

She went east! That's all I know! THAT'S ALL I KNOW!

Seifer tried to get a more exact destination out of him but either the man didn't know or there was some fear inside him that overruled the immediate threat of a slit throat. Seifer turned and looked at Squall. His hand wasn't at his blade anymore but his fury was obvious. He isn't lying. What do you want me to do with him?

Leave him down here, he'd spat back. He's no one.

There was light ahead, finally, and Seifer almost sighed as they walked towards it. Squall lagged behind a little, trying to find his feet, his head heavy with what the man had told him. What are you doing Rin? He could hear voices ahead and he was lifted bodily up into light and noise from the darkness of underground. Squall shielded his eyes from the glare of searchlights as Irvine and Selphie hauled him out of the pit.

"You really know how to start a party."

He stared around him. Seifer was shouting something to someone in a military uniform, and the entire area was lit up. He could hear fireworks going off somewhere in the distance and it took him a second to realise that that wasn't what they were. He looked at Irvine and opened his mouth to ask what the hell is going on but the other man was already talking.

"About two hours after you went down there we got people just hauling ass out of nowhere and trying to take down patrols all over the city." He nodded at Squall's expression of disbelief. "Yeah, exactly. Just groups of guys bringing out guns and trying to take over buildings around the place. Checkpoints too."

"Cultists." He blinked. "They tried to take the city?"

Irvine nodded again. "They did a crappy job though. Doing." You could still hear the distant pop of gunfire. "Whatever plan they had you sure threw a wrench into it. If they had a timetable I'd say you and that ass over there managed to hit it until it broke. They just attacked whatever was closest." He clapped Squall hard on the shoulder, ignoring the wince this caused. "Good job man."

Seifer walked back over, and the grin on his face was full of satisfaction. "I guess they thought all of SeeD was coming down on them and decided it was now or never. Well, it's never. "

Squall brushed himself down and stood. He had the vague idea that as Commander he should have been giving orders, but the speed f events had overtaken him, and all he wanted was to get his head down and sleep the dust away. He took a deep breath. It wasn't much but he'd take what he could get. "Anything major?"

"Nope!" Selphie grinned. "Like whack-a-mole."

He looked around himself, at the crumbling city around him, the ruins that had been left behind by the people that had commanded it. Generations of politicians and soldiers had came and went and kept it much the same. Edea had ruled it for months but even her influence hadn't been able to transform the city. Fujin and Raijin had done their best to re-build without changing. Xu had cut a swath through the head of the city like an executioner, but even then the body kept moving. There was something about Deling City which refused to change. It was pig-iron, and would break before it bent. He made his decision then. "We're going home."

Irvine sighed contentedly. "Good, it's bloody cold out here. Can we-"

Squall shook his head. "No, not to the mansion." He took a deep breath. "Almasy, call the Reconstruction management together and tell them what they need to know to keep the city running. Irvine, Selphie. Your job's done, with these guys-" he jerked a finger at the unconscious cultists behind him, "-out of commission it's as safe as we'll ever make it. I'm sure what's left of the army will want their city back. Irvine, make sure we're not leaving anything behind. Selphie, before you strip it down call Esthar and get them to send the Ragnarok over."

The woman's eyes lit up like flares. "Seriously."

Squall nodded and turned to the three. He'd have preferred two, but everything he had learned was telling him not to waste such a precious resource, and that part of him was overriding his complaining inner child. "We're going back to Balamb Garden as soon as humanely possible." The next words came unbidden, but as soon as he said them he knew they would be the truth.

"You're going home."

Irvine and Selphie hugged, either at the thought of going back to Balamb or just at the thought of leaving Deling. Seifer stood with his arms crossed, the expression on his face trying to remain totally neutral while holding down it's disbelief that he was included. Squall made a mental note to get Irvine – or Selphie, more likely – to smooth it over with the others. Best too that Seifer's arrival at his old school went as announced as possible. Between all of the orders they would have their work cut out of them. They'd have the time it took for the Ragnarok to be fuelled and crossing the ocean to be ready. Two days maybe.

By then he would be long gone.