It's been 84... I mean 11 years, but I recently got into rereading this and found a draft of the continuing chapter so here goes, I'm back to finish this!
More references to the flashback scene from Dazzled. Not all details might be accurate because it has been an Extremely long time since I played the game. I forgot about the existence of Fujin and Raijin for instance, oops?
Content warnings: Abuse, suicide, sex mention
The Fall
Chapter 9: Wish the World Away
Is it over? There's nothing but nothing here.
I fell a very long time after Ultimecia's death curse, and now I don't know where I am. I don't think I'm anywhere. I make the motion of walking, but without any real reference in space—without any space at all—I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere.
Not knowing when I am is infinitely worse. Will I ever return to a state of being that involves sequential time, a past, present, and future? Or will I wander outside of time until...
Can I even die if I exist outside time? I shiver at the thought. Even landing thousands of years before or after our time period might be preferable to that.
Focus, Quistis! Think of where you want to be. The orphanage. The crashing of waves on the shore, the old stone house. I was happy there, and they'll be waiting for me. Squall, Zell, Selphie, Irvine... Where I am needed, wanted. I have to get there.
The nothingness gradually coalesces into recognizable shapes as I walk. Is that a seagull's cry? The sunlight is warm on my skin. Finally!
I stand on a beach, my boots sinking slightly into soft sand. I recognize the road that slopes up from the beach, and the sunwashed stone of the old orphanage at the top. The lighthouse is off to my left. I am tired and ache in more places than I can count, but eagerly start up the sand-and-gravel slope to the house. So close now, so close...
I am almost all the way up the slope. Just a few steps more and the house will be in full view. There are quiet voices up ahead, from outside the orphanage. A car pulls away in the distance. Is everyone here ahead of me? I quicken my steps.
"QUISTY!"
Not so much my name, but an anguished scream. I stop dead in my tracks.
"Quisty, wait!" There are confused voices, frantically running feet.
My heart pounds in my throat. Why did I stop, just now, when someone called me in obvious distress? Why can't I seem to move?
What's wrong with this picture?
I look up again at the house, with its sound roof and strong walls. Not caved in from age and abandonment, but a working home.
The voice that called me was a child's. A familiar voice, but ten years younger.
Right place, wrong time, then. Calm down, Quistis, this wasn't unexpected in Time Compression. I shouldn't be seen, but there aren't a lot of good hiding places anyway. I don't remember any incident quite like this. Is it one of the missing memories?
Why would Seifer call my name like that?
I climb a little way up the path up to the orphanage so it comes into full view and hide behind a tree. I know the concealment is incomplete, but I'll just watch enough to figure out what I did wrong. Then I can move on elsewhere. Elsewhen.
My heart leaps in recognition and fear when Seifer, maybe six or seven at this time, charges Squall. Matron breaks up the scuffle, but I still don't see myself. Was I out this day? In bed sick?
Seifer then sees it fit to turn on Selphie. Zell is shouting. Nothing short of a coma would have kept me from away from this situation. Could I really have forgotten an incident this serious?
Why is Seifer, instead of being sarcastic or gleeful, so... angry?
Quisty, wait.
Oh.
There was the sound of the car pulling away. And an older memory, though it took place shortly before this scene, of Seifer telling me not to go with the Trepes. I remember looking for him, wanting to say good-bye, but they couldn't find him and my parents needed to catch the ferry.
He wanted to see me that badly, and I never knew.
Caught up in my thoughts, I almost miss it when someone comes running down the path from the house. I shrink closer to the tree as the child Seifer rushes past me down to the beach, obviously upset. I can hear weeping from the orphanage children and Matron's soothing voice behind me.
Presently, there is a splash from the sea below me. I creep down the path, tearing myself away from the commotion in front of the orphanage. Matron can take care of the others but Seifer is alone. I scan the water with my eyes but he is nowhere to be seen. Breathless moments pass.
Don't panic, he's just swimming around underwater. He used to prank us by dragging at a leg from below or jumping out of the waves. He could stay under for a pretty long time. And who in the history of the world heard of some six-year-old suiciding because a girl moved away? No, don't even think that. Just... just come up for air already, you overemotive twit!
As if in answer he breaks the surface, and I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. He strikes at the water with his hands, screaming. God, if the kid wants to have a tantrum, can't he have it on land? It's hard to believe just how lax safety standards were here, which is somewhat understandable given how understaffed and out of the way it was. It's a miracle we survived to adulthood.
Survived, only to... I sigh as Seifer dips into the water again, though he's clearly getting tired. If there were a lifeguard on duty, he would have been ordered out. But there isn't, and little Seifer has the look of someone who needs to wear himself out to stop the thoughts from coming. I've known that feeling myself but usually tired myself on dry land, or had a watchful eye on me if I was in water.
He comes up for air again, his movements listless. Isn't Matron coming from the house to get him? But he's in no danger, is he? He did live to grow up, and became Knight to a Sorceress who wanted to burn the world down.
He'll come back up soon. Maybe he's making for the beach even now. I glance back at the house for any movement. Nothing.
I turn back to the sea, and still nothing. It's not so much the length of time he was under but the lethargic way I saw Seifer move that makes me uneasy. I could call Matron, risking possibly awkward explanations, but by then it might be too late.
My feet pound on the sandy slope to the beach below. I guess I made up my mind, then. Boots off at least, Quistis. I throw them onto the sand, then keep running against the soft, yielding sand of the beach. The water shocks me with its coldness as I duck under the surface. I swim towards the point where I saw him last, but I don't see him. The salty water stings at my eyes, and slimy seaweed entangles an arm before I break free.
Even as I dive further down I have to fight my own disbelief. Is it even possible for him to die here, at this time? Would that change history if he did?
For a split second I pause, suspended in the water. Would that prevent the bombing of Trabia Garden, the Lunar Cry?
As an abstract question, it's disturbing. As a practical consideration, it's nauseating. Find him. Find him now! Just as my lungs start crying out for air, there below me, waving seaweed that isn't seaweed. A child's arms, flailing for the surface, too tired to manage it.
I surge down, reach, and grab the cold and slippery little arm. Up, back toward the blurry oval of the sun, now! The arm slips out of my grasp and I mouth a swear. Deeper down, again, to hook my arm around his waist, stroke upwards with my other arm. Swatting away the strands of seaweed that cling to him, seeing spots dance before my eyes, I struggle blindly upward-
Air rushes into my lungs, welcome and sweet. I hold Seifer's head above the water and make for shore, a distance of twenty meters and infinity. Moving rubbery limbs by willpower alone I clamber onto the beach, dragging a violently coughing Seifer with me. He collapses down on the sand as his lungs expel the rest of the water they've breathed.
We're both soaked through and shivering from the cold, and we've drifted quite a bit from the orphanage. There's still no one coming down here. if I hadn't happened to be here, what might have happened?
The coughing has stopped. I turn to meet a suspicious pair of green eyes.
"Who're you, lady?"
Oh, you're so very welcome. "I'm... someone who used to live here."
"With Matron?"
"I... guess. Yes."
"What're..." he coughs again; his lips have turned blue.
"You should go up to the house now." My hand hovers near him without quite touching. Remembering the child he was, I'm fairly certain he won't take well to a stranger's touch. "Change out of those clothes."
He glances at the house, then looks away. "Can't."
"Why not?" He starts walking in the other direction, in fact, and I hurry to follow. Is it wrong that I want to grab the kid and physically march him back home?
"'Cause I've been a jerk, that's why." He sits down suddenly on the sand, arms crossed. He shivers from the cold but looks straight ahead, out to sea.
"Hey." I plop down next to him, or my legs give out. Should I be interacting with him like this, wouldn't it change history? Or, if I am here, does that mean this has already happened? Either way it doesn't feel right to leave him here, at least until a grownup—Matron—comes to take charge of him.
"What's wrong? Do you want to talk about it?"
He looks down at his wet sneakers for quite some time, then says softly: "I should have said sorry to Quisty. I was mean to her."
I feel a pang at that. "I'm sure your friend forgives you. She'll know you didn't mean it."
"How? I never told her." He hugs his legs and places his chin on his knees, his eyes still on the crashing waves.
"Give it time." Time, against all odds, brought me here to save him and to hear his apology. "Some things you just... know."
"I wanted to give her flowers." Still hugging his legs, he leans a cheek against his knee to look at me.
"She would have liked that." My voice is soft. "Very much."
"I guess." His gaze travel to my feet. "Where's your shoes, lady?"
"Where are-"
"I'll get 'em for you." He's already scampering off down the beach in the direction of the orphanage, toward my boots lying black against the pale sand. Then or now, he's not big on listening.
A breeze passes by, making me shiver, but the sun is slowly warming me. Where to, now? How do I find the place and time I need to return to?
A shadow falls across me. "Cute little bastard, ain't he?"
I glance up absently, then adrenaline slams into my exhausted body. I scramble up, reaching for Save the Queen at my side while Seifer watches, arms crossed and face expressionless.
"You," he says flatly, "look like a drowned rat."
You're welcome. Again. Now that I have my weapon in hand, I have the presence of mind to get a closer look. He looks as haggard and unkempt as the last time I saw him. His gaze is calm, though, if shadowed. Haunted.
"...Seifer?"
"You're not safe here." He strides forward and grabs my arm before I can raise my tired arm. He's too close, towering over me, hand like a vice gripping me. "We have to get Outside. Start over if you want to get back."
"You have the nerve to talk to me about safety-" I make another effort to shake him off, to no avail. He looks past me and I follow his gaze, where little Seifer drags my boots across the sand towards us. The child stops in his tracks at the sight of the strange man.
"Hey, kiddo." Seifer's expression is unreadable as he looks down at his childhood self. He reaches out and takes my boots from his child-self's slack hands. "Don't screw up too bad, all right?"
I almost correct him to say badly, but the beach fades to black and little Seifer's startled face with it. I stand in what looks like a dark, dry land, only craggy rock formations breaking the monotony all around. I don't think anything lives here.
I turn to Seifer, who grimly holds onto my arm. "Let me go."
"Not until you hear me out." His voice is low, unemotional.
"I won't hear your excuses." My raised voice echoes in the oppressive silence that surrounds us. "Release me, Seifer. Last warning."
"Look, Instr-"
I call up the blistering ice of a Blizzaga spell and let it blaze blue along my arm, cold as anger. Cold as the moment when I thought he had died, when I realized what he had done to Trabia Garden, cold as the blade he held to my neck, to Rinoa's.
The line of his jaw tenses subtly but his fingers dig into my arm, his eyes into mine. When I look down, his fingers are tinting toward blue.
"Let go, Seifer." My heart races. What game is he playing?
"Look at me, Trepe. Look. At me." His hand pulls at my arm, insistent.
My eyes are dragged upward, almost against my will, at the command in that pain-edged voice. His eyes are clear, no hint of the storm that had clouded them since Deling City. I see his grave, grim face, the clarity in his eyes, and the cold wavers.
"You won't get home this way." He holds my eyes with the kind of absolute conviction that only heroes and madmen can manage. "You can't find the right time unless you go around."
Madman, then. "What in Hyne's name are you on about?" I snatch my arm away and he lets me go, probably because he has my attention. Or maybe his frozen hand can't maintain the grip.
"Why were you there, in the wrong time?" He asks abruptly.
I open my mouth for a sarcastic retort, then close it. I wish I knew. I was briefed about the nature of Time Compression, how it was something of a psychological space, a state where the boundaries of time and space were broken. I was told the right state of mind, the right emotion would get us back. To do that I concentrated on my friends, on being needed and close. But I still ended up... elsewhen.
"I was in the right place, with the right set of people." I don't quite meet his eyes. "I'll get there in a few tries."
"And exhaust yourself in timelessness while you're at it." He rubs his bluish hand against his tattered coat, then sticks it in a pocket. "I knew Odine was a little piece of shit, but him and his puppet president sending you all in here without Clue One-"
"What choice did he have?" What choice did any of us have? "We had to clean up the mess you helped make, if you remember."
He dismisses that with a curt motion of his hand. "You're going home. I'm getting you there."
"Why would I-" I shake my head. He is moving too fast as he always does, random and confusing as quicksilver. "How can I trust you?"
"Don't." His answer is immediate. "Trust yourself."
I am reminded, again, that I cannot trust his grip on reality. Not even before the events at Timber, but now... "...What?"
"What were you thinking when you went to that time? What emotions brought you here?" His eyes are bright with intensity, but he seems almost distracted as he speaks. He has the look of someone who is thinking ahead, planning, weighing the possibilities—exactly what I can't do in this place beyond all knowledge and training.
"I was thinking..." the words come hesitantly. "Of friends. Being safe." A pause. "Needed."
"Who did you meet there?" He looks away from me to scan the arid landscape around us.
The answer, impossible and true, is literally right in front of me.
"Rule Number One of Time Compression." He bends down to pick up my boots. "You can't get to one point in time-space looking over your shoulder somewhere else."
I hold out my hand for the boots, but he ignores me and kneels in front of me instead.
"What are you doing?!"
"You don't want to hear my excuses. Fine." He places my boots on the ground before me and looks up at me with those clear, calm eyes. I think I almost prefer him raging and ranting. "But you need me if you want to get home to your goody two-shoes friends. Hell, to bring me to justice if that's the way you want it to be."
"I have never needed you." I couldn't afford to, because I could never depend on him. I take the boots from the ground before me and pull them on, traitorous tears stinging my eyes. "Stop following me."
"Why did you save my life?"
"Why did you kill all those people?"
My shout hangs between us, echoing in the absence of space and time.
"Because there was unfinished business." He rises to his feet to face me, but somehow without looming menacingly as he always used to. "You can't choose where you go in space and time if you're being pulled elsewhere. You have to face it first."
"You didn't answer my question."
"I answered both our questions."
"Are you comparing what you did to Time Compression?" My fist clenches of its own accord. Magic and weapons be damned, I want to punch him out as though we were both untrained children. "Are you saying you had no choice, that you were a victim too?"
"Of course I had a choice, and I chose to follow Edea... Matron. To protect her." He runs an unsteady hand through his hair.
"I said no excuses." My head spins with emotions, and a deep breath only makes it worse. "Maybe... maybe it's true you were tortured, and threatened with death. I know what the Galbadian military is capable of."
The twitch in his jaw and the shadow of pain in his eyes, the way he tries to hold very still to hide his reaction, tell me all I need to know. An answering pain rises up in my own chest, and I force the next words past it.
"But you didn't try to escape or warn Garden long after you had the freedom to do it, and the things you did went far beyond protecting yourself and Matron."
"No excuses." He spreads his hands, the fight gone from him. "If you want to strike me down right here, go ahead."
"Oh don't be stupid, Seifer. Who said anything about killing you?" Almost destroying the world did nothing to cure his dramatics. "All I said was, stop following me."
"I'm not! That's my point. If either of us wants to make a real choice in this forsaken hellhole we have to stop being pulled everywhere else with these... these knots in space-time, the places we can't stay away from. And we can't deal with that by thinking happy thoughts, we do it by facing those fuckers down."
"There is no 'we.' You broke that and threw it away."
"Yes, I did." His voice is harsh, almost proud. No excuses. "And still here we are, trapped together at the end of the world. So what are you going to do about it?"
The thought of running around with this traitor is like a kick to the teeth. But can I deny that I was pulled to him, to that moment in space and time to meet him and save him?
And if I was called that way, is it so impossible that he was, too?
Maybe we really are each other's unfinished business. That I can believe, after everything he's put me through.
"All right." I can't believe I'm saying this, but at least this way he stays in my sight and maybe I can haul him to the war crimes tribunal he deserves. "But try anything and you'll get your wish to die by my hand."
"I don't have to try anything, 'anything' finds us here." The smirk and the bravado feel normal, almost a comfort. "It's Time Compression, Trepe!"
"Stay back!"
We both freeze at the voice. The light is darker, and in a corner another Seifer stands off with the Sorceress, Deling under his blade. We help each other into a corner behind painted backdrops so we won't be seen.
We watch, silent and tense, while Seifer goes from belligerence to confusion to compliance while both of me, past and present, watch helplessly.
The scene fades little by little, and by the time Rinoa, then I, then the others clear out of the room it hangs transparent against the bare rocks from earlier before it fades out of sight.
"That was one of your unfinished businesses?" Seifer gives me a look. "Lame."
"Excuse me? I would think it's one of yours!" I never did get an answer for the fragments of memory I was showered with for being in that room with him.
"Nah, I'm over it."
Even as he walks away, however, streets that I never saw in life but saw so many times in my mind's eye start to materialize around us, forlorn back alleys, a corner-
And then it all fades as Seifer walks on. What the?
Before I can say anything the ground underfoot becomes pavement, and elegant shrubbery appear on either side.
I know this place. My steps slow, and then stop. I don't want to see this. I don't want him to see it.
"Mom, look!" I close my eyes, but I know that voice. Too well. "I found this doll, isn't she pretty?"
"Where did you find that?" The answering voice is sharp, on the verge of shattering. "Give it back!"
"Mom?"
I open my eyes to the sight down the lane, a woman sitting in the sun on a bench before the stuccoed house I remember with aching clarity. She clutches a child's doll dressed in lace and satin as though to break it.
A little light-haired girl who looks enough like her to be her daughter—but never could be—stands empty-handed, not understanding the depth of the pain and sickness before her. The whole thing is filtered through a film of useless tears, as though this were some sentimental soft-focus tableau.
"I'm so sorry, honey." Janis Trepe, Mom, reaches out to stroke my hair, and I can see how stiffly my younger self holds herself to stay in place despite her fear. "Mother isn't feeling well. I'm going inside for a bit. Play on the swings, all right?"
Mom heads to the house, cradling the doll to her as she might a baby, while her daughter sits on the bench next to where her mother had sat and leans her head against the backrest, as though on a shoulder that isn't there.
I turn from the sight and walk away. The pavement underfoot shifts to grass, fragrant from a recent clipping, and I am among clusters of people whose low murmurs among themselves do nothing to cover the voice of a man, his fair hair and drawn face stark against his black suit, talking to my child self in a black dress with a white lace collar.
"I know this is all very difficult for you, Quistis, and it's going to take me a little time to get things together again, after your mom..." his voice catches before he composes himself. "I've been talking to Cid Kramer, you remember him don't you? A very nice man."
Child Quistis nods, looking straight ahead.
"He has another place for children, bigger this time, with instructors and a training program. I think it might help you to stay with children your own age and continue your education. They're very elite, I hear. You'll fit right in, and I can come visit you." He never would. "What do you think, Quistis? Would you like that?"
My younger self looks down at the grass, and I remember the sight of that bright green before my shiny black shoes, knowing there was only one right answer.
"Yes, Daddy."
What is the point of this exercise? I need to get out of here. Before I go more than a few steps the people, the wide sky, the little girl and her father fade away. The bare, rocky nothingness rushes in and I can breathe again.
"What the hell was that about? Were those the people who took you away?"
"My parents." I forgot he was here. I can't look at him.
"Not that they're up for Parents of the Year or anything. What's their damage?"
None of your business, I want to snarl, but my mouth is already moving. "They had a daughter who they lost. It was very tragic."
Technically she was my sister, but for that to be true both of us would have had to be daughters.
"And you were their replacement puppy, and that was her doll? Did the mom die of sadness or what?"
I look him in the eye. "I suppose suicide counts, yes."
That shuts even Seifer up, for a second. "Wow. Where do they find these amazing functional families?"
"You're allowed to gloat, you know." I walk past him, I don't care where to. There is nowhere anyway, here at the end of the world. "You told me not to go with them, and you were right."
"I did? I guess I was." He's keeping up behind me, from the sound of his voice. "Much as I'd like to credit my clairvoyance, I didn't have any way to know Mr. and Mrs. Blondie were selfish pricks who were about as ready to be parents again as, I don't know, me?"
I snort in spite of myself. "Oh, come on. Not even they were that bad."
"I guess not." He snickers. "Thing is, I was selfish and you had crappy luck and that's it."
"The story of our lives." I stop and look back at him in the absolute stillness. "I just kept thinking, there must be something I could have done..."
"Don't." He comes to a stop facing me. "You're always trying to save people."
"And I failed, every time." One of the starker reminders stands in front of me, gaunt and ragged.
"People can fuck up just fine on their own, you know. It's not about you."
"Do you mean I can't stop anything from happening then, no matter how terrible?" Heat rises in my chest at the injustice, the terror of such a statement.
"Sure you can. You already did, right? The whole kicked the traitor's ass and killed an evil Sorceress thing?"
"I couldn't do anything for Squall." The abandoned child with lonely eyes, so like me.
"He looked like he was doing fine."
Don't I know it. "No thanks to you."
Our surroundings move and stain with color, and unsurprisingly I find myself under a starry sky, music and lights filtering in through the archway into to the balcony where we now stand.
The SeeD graduation ball. Of course.
I don't need to look in to know Squall and Rinoa are dancing in perfect step while I watch from a corner, knowing there was no comparison and I could never measure up. Again.
Seifer looks into the hall with his elbows braced against the balcony railing.
"She's always been a good dancer. You know what's great about Rinoa? She's so selfish. If she wants to spend time with you it's because she likes you or wants something from you. Both, a lot of the time. She never treated people as projects to save."
Don't let him bait you, Quistis. "You two sound like you were a great fit."
"Eh, she was okay. Too bland for my tastes, though. Puppy dog eyes only go so far."
"She got far with Squall, evidently."
"Oh, please." He rolls his eyes. "You would have been bored with Puberty Boy in five minutes flat. You should have fucked him and seen that for yourself."
"Was that how you realized, with...?" What am I saying?! The grounds are lamplit and colorful below. Surely it's not too far to jump?
"Sure, Rin had a thing for me for a little while there, to spite Daddy." He flicks a hand as though this happens all the time, which it probably does. "Doubt I could get it up, though, for a girl who sleeps in a frilly pink bedroom. Bless her heart."
"Thank you, I emphatically did not need to know that!" Rinoa's terrified screams echo in the back of my mind, but it all seems far away with the drifting music and the lights warm in Seifer's eyes.
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." He shrugs, holds out a hand. "Wanna dance?"
"What?"
"It's a party. There's music. Our existence might be obliterated outside all space and time. Why not?"
"How do you get a dance when the world isn't ending?" I take his hand. Why not, indeed?
His hand is big and warm holding mine, and he draws away before reeling me in spinning, the faraway stars and the lights spinning with me. I am brought up against the yielding solidity of his chest and he smiles down so close before he sends me spinning again.
I did not know I could move like this outside of battle. He has a gravity all his own that pulls me into his grace, two bodies drawing together then apart, twirling and passing in intertwined movements thrilling and eternal.
Voices and footfalls approach the balcony. We can't be seen but we are clapping our hands and then circling each other like adversaries in a friendly sparring match, and I can't break the rhythm.
Just as shadows darken the balcony doorway everything blurs together and brightens into blankness. Seifer makes a showy bow.
"That's how." He looks up with a smirk.
He is out of breath, and my own heart is pounding. How can I feel drunk without drinking anything?
No, wait—sweat gleams on his forehead before he turns away. I've seen him take out a squadron without needing to catch a breath. To be sure he isn't in peak condition right now, but-
The sights and smells of an alleyway hover into existence before flickering out, again. Seifer stumbles where he stands.
"This happened before. What's going on?"
Whip in hand, on the lookout for threats, I turn to him just in time to see him collapse.
"Seifer!"
"It's nothing-" he holds up a hand. "Injuries."
The street is redrawn like an unseen artist is working with a faster brush, this time clearly enough to make out the shapes of people, before it fades. Seifer strains and then relaxes, face pale where he sits with his knees up.
I coil the whip and ram it back onto its belt clip. With controlled, even steps I walk over to him and stand before him. A deep breath, then another until I'm sure my voice won't shake from the anger that's making my whole body tremble.
"You. Rotten. Cheat."
He looks up with darkened eyes, a sheen of perspiration on his pale face.
"You coward. After talking a big game about facing our demons so we can go home, you hold back on me?"
Seifer buries his face in his knees, breathing hard. I crouch down so I can get closer, so he can't hide from me.
"How long were you trying to keep us from that place?"
"From the first," he gasps out. And he's still trying, isn't he. Don't try to physically shake him out of it, Quistis. It won't work. No matter how tempting it is.
"You were lying to me. Promising to get me home while all this time resisting the pull of space-time with your Knight powers, assuring I couldn't get there."
"No! I swear." He shakes his head, even that much movement visibly costing him. "I was trying to pull you to the right place-time, get you through the waystations. We're so close, but this keeps getting in the way and it can't be right."
The woman walking away again and again with a last smile. Be good.
"It is right." I grasp his forearm and meet his eyes over it. "I know what happened there, Seifer. It's in the way and it's not going away."
"It's not even your past. It doesn't concern you."
"You're so full of it, Seifer Almasy." I stand in one rigid motion and walk away a few steps. I really might get violent with him in arm's range. "After you watched my parents reject and abandon me, after making me tell you what happened to my mother, you want to hide your precious past from me?"
"Quistis-"
"No!" I'm screaming at him; bringing it down a notch takes so much effort my throat burns. "This is Timber all over again. It's Dollet. The hostage rescue. You ride in, promising to save everyone, but you're so full of yourself you just hurt them worse. Then you charm your way back because your heart's in the right place, because you suffered too, because you're young, because of your potential... but you know what? This time there's no coming back."
I'm still breathing hard from anger and stop to catch a breath. Seifer's own labored breathing wheezes in and out, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on me.
"This is the end of things. If you keep holding back I can't go home and we'll both die here."
Seifer's voice is so ragged the words are hard to understand. "If I lose control here because of what we see, my Knight powers could go on a rampage. Kill you. Me. Destroy time. I have no fucking idea."
"You won't lose control. We don't have a choice anyway."
"If I become dangerous..." He lets out a long breath. "Will you stop me?"
I go cold all over at the way he says stop. "Yes."
"You won't let me hurt you, or anyone." He's growing paler, his voice fainter. "No matter what it takes."
My smile is bitter on my lips. "Did I ever?"
"Promise."
"I promise."
He closes his eyes, going so limp where he sits it looks like he's fainting, and the city jumps into existence as though buckets of color were thrown into the air to make it.
I wobble and nearly fall as the the ground opens up in front of me. We are on the rooftop of what looks like a low warehouse strewn with discarded bags and random debris, looking down at the twisting streets of inner Deling.
"Where're we going, Mom?"
The voice comes from under my feet, almost. Young Seifer, so close below I can see scratches and plasters on his face, follows the blond woman from the vision down the street.
"We're going to see if you can actually be good." She pulls him along by a shoulder with such force he stumbles every few steps. If a Garden instructor were treating a child that way they would be reported and written up. I draw back from the edge of the roof in case either of them looks up, boots noiseless on littered concrete.
"C'mon, you know I can be good, you don't need to-"
He is cut off by a sharp slapping sound, and I look away even though I do not see. Instead my eyes fall on present-day Seifer, his coloring and breathing already better without the strain of fighting Time Compression itself, but his eyes are glassy and look straight ahead at nothing. So much the better if he can dissociate his way through the ordeal.
Below mother and son turn a corner into an alleyway, her steps quicker and him clearly being dragged now. The bile rises in my throat. I want to jump down like a hero, confront her, and whisk the little boy far away.
Except the boy will be whisked away soon enough. And the only thing that scarred him worse than his mother's mistreatment was her final abandonment of him.
"Stay here, all right? No following me. Stay right here until I'm back for you." Her voice is almost warm in the final moments.
"Mom?" The boy's voice quavers. "What're you..."
She walks away by a different route now, not around the same corner but straight ahead.
He lasts twenty steps before he cries out. "Mom!"
She stops at that, visible now between the low-slung buildings, and looks over a shoulder. "Be good, now."
She walks away, in no hurry, until her footfalls turn a corner and fade away. Below me I can hear young Seifer's breath coming ragged, close to tears but trying to hide it.
Before I can stop myself I look sideways at Seifer. His face is turned half away, but the set of his jaw is resigned more than anything and his shoulders are slumped, not tense with dangerous energy. This is the resolution he needs, maybe what I need too, and at least it's over or we'll wait for Edea to come for him and-
There's no sense of movement or transition at all, except something like a quiet whoosh in the inner ear. We're somewhere different though, in a different trash-strewn alley, next to a door with flaking blue paint. The building materials and geometry of the streets are familiar, as are the underlying smells of food and rotting. We might still be in the same neighborhood.
"Is the lady coming?" The voice from behind the door, leaking out the gaps where it doesn't fit right in the frame, makes me stiffen and my eyes go to Seifer next to me, standing listless only for his eyes to widen at his mother's voice.
"Yeah we called her," says a man's voice. "The boys are keeping an eye on him and he'll be fine until she's here."
"She has to come quick." The mother's voice trembles and there is the sound of liquid being poured into a cup. "It'll get cold soon."
"Look here, Len." The man speaks with the weary air of someone who had the same argument many times. "Clearly you still give a damn about the boy. Why not take him home, get clean, try to make a fresh start? Someone can take him in until-"
"I pushed him out a window, Nik." I remember the vision, Seifer's memory of falling with glass shards, the cuts on child Seifer's face. "How many times did I try to get clean now? Ten? Twenty? He won't live that long. I'm going to kill him one day, and then I'll fucking kill myself. Matter of fact I should end things before I can do it to him."
I can't even look at Seifer. Beside me a tiny strangled sound comes from his throat. What do I do?
"Still. You have to send him away that far? To some island?"
"It has to be far. He's come back from every other place I tried to leave him with."
I reach out to put a hand on Seifer's arm. He steps out of the touch, and my heart pounds with fear.
"She has a good place, right, this orphanage lady?" Len is pouring her drink again. "She'll be good to him? What was her name, Edie?"
"Edea."
Seifer moves almost faster than I can follow with my eyes, rushing the door with a half-formed snarl, but I expected this. I grab him by the collar and slam him to a wall away from the door, struggling with him, face pale and his bared teeth paler, as I might against an avalanche.
"Did you hear something?"
The colors bleed out just as the door begins to open and we are back in the void of Time Compression.
Seifer, stumbling without the wall to support him, throws me off and I catch my balance. He stands slumped staring at the ground, dry sobs coming out of him. Maybe I can reason with-
The ground around him is burning as though someone is pressing a cigarette butt to the void, an irregular hole opening up and curling red with black edges. Another hole opens up, and then another.
promising to save everyone
Sensations flow out of the holes he has torn, languages I don't understand, boiling seas, a hummed song. The nothingness shakes as though to come down around our ears.
but you just hurt them worse.
He looks up, movements controlled, tears running down his face and purpose in his eyes. He walks away, every footprint a new hole in space-time, making the cacophony worse and the void more unstable.
"Where are you going?"
"To find her." There is a calm madness in his eyes when he meets mine. "We'll be a family again."
My chest grows cold. "You can't. She knew it couldn't work."
"I can make it work. I'll find an alternate timeline where it's possible. Change time itself so she'll make different choices and be okay."
"Then what happens to this timeline? To time itself?"
His eyes look beyond me to some shining, distant horizon. "I don't care."
Promise.
"I won't let you do it."
"Try and stop me."
I promise.
Fighting him in Time Compression is nothing like inside time and space. Former Knight he may be, but it was his Sorceress who had compressed time and no one living understands it, can connect to it and control it like he does.
He doesn't even draw Hyperion or cast a spell; a slashing motion of his hand and magma bubbles up through a wound in the void. A menagerie of monsters, no less belligerent for their confusion, spill out of rents in space-time to fly, screech, crawl and charge at me.
All the time different realities flicker and fade around us as he searches for the one that will let him change everything, take over his mother's will and her life to love him and be a family, as he now knows she wanted. The tremors deepen, and something warns me time-space can't take much more of the strain.
"Seifer!" I strike a Gayla out of the air and make my way toward him, fighting every step against a sandstorm that came out of nowhere.
I gave him my word to stop him no matter what it takes. Even if I didn't, as a SeeD who swore to protect the world I can't let him destroy it.
Before he can open another portal I unfurl Save the Queen at him and grab his wrist, pulling him tight toward me as though we were still dancing. An electric shock sent sparking along the lash seizes him and leaves him limp, fighting just to stay standing. Then I charge him, bulling into his midsection with a shoulder.
Straight into a burning tear in space-time behind him.
We fall together, for a very long time. Maybe forever.
Is it over?
Next: Epilogue