Chapter V – You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

A/N:

Rebekka - Thanks for the review. Hope you like the rest of the story too as it unfolds.

Alessia Heartilly - Thanks for the follow!

You're gonna make me wonder what I'm doing
Staying far behind without you
You're gonna make me wonder what I'm saying
You're gonna make me give myself a good talking to

"Yeah," Seifer giggled. He was kicked back in his desk chair in the infirmary, one hand on the arm of his chair while the other twirled his cane. His feet were propped up on the desk. He had the phone cradled between his cheek and shoulder.

Squall had just walked in, without knocking as usual – he was the boss after all. Still, it offended Seifer in some minor way. He thought Squall could at least do that thing that parents do where they respect your privacy by knocking on your bedroom door but assert their authority by coming in anyway. But NOOOOOO. That was too much to ask.

"Seifer," Squall beckoned. He was standing in the middle of the infirmary now, across from the doctor's position behind the desk.

Seifer didn't respond out loud. He didn't even look up – his gaze instead remained fixed on the floor, or from Squall's perspective possibly on the empty space just behind the desk. Instead, he raised one upturned finger as if to say "hold on."

Squall's eyes widened minutely in surprise before he collected himself. He should have been accustomed to this behavior from Seifer by now, but he just wasn't.

The doctor giggled again. "No, what are you doing?"

"Seifer," Squall repeated, more insistently. Seifer gave him the same finger as before.

"I'm in my office," he snickered. "Yeah, Squall is here. No no, I can talk. Of course. I can always talk to you," he cooed into the phone.

'Who the hell is he talking to?' Squall thought. He placed his hands on his hips, the bile rising in his throat. He had a familiar idea but really didn't want to entertain it.

"Yeah," Seifer pretended to stifle a laugh. "Yeah he still wears that moth-eaten jacket. Oh I know."

"Seifer!" Squall was nearly fuming now.

The doctor sighed and placed a palm over the receiver's mouthpiece to mute it. "God, just give me a second." He took his hand away and spoke again, "Alright babe I gotta go, Squall is getting pissy. I'll see you Tuesday night? Yeah I love you too," he finished and hung up.

"Who was that?" Squall asked as soon as the call had ended.

"No one, why?" Seifer asked innocently.

Squall blinked. He was in that odd vacuous bipolar mental space where social norms and expectations are nonexistent, and one is unable to judge with any real perspective whether they are being completely paranoid or totally reasonable. He chose to go with his more pessimistic judgment as that seemed to be the typically safer option. "Were you talking to Rinoa? Are you dating Rinoa?" he came right out.

Seifer looked genuinely bewildered, and he knew it, and he silently congratulated himself on his acting skills. "No!" he insisted. "Why would you think that?"

Squall cocked his neck back in surprise, and looked to the ceiling and then to his right. He was doubting himself now, and embarrassed for being so blatantly suspicious and untrusting. Seifer had saved Rinoa's life when asked, and hadn't even expected payment for it. Just a job – so that he could come home.

"I'm sorry Seifer," Squall said sincerely, "I…"

"Hey," Seifer interrupted, and raised both open palms, tilting his head back with eyes closed in a magnanimous sort of gesture. "All is forgiven," he crooned. "I'm sorry for keeping you waiting. What did you need?"

Squall's eyes narrowed. Seifer was never this nice, and now he was fucking suspicious again. "I was…" he paused, "just going to remind you that I need your quarterly cost report by close of business tomorrow. You're the last department…"

"Say no more," Seifer waved him off. He looked as pious as a choir boy now. "I will start on it first thing in the morning and it will be on your desk by two at the latest."

"… Thanks," Squall said, and regarded Seifer. He turned to leave but stopped with his hand on the door, and turned around again. "One more thing," he said.

"Yes, headmaster?" Seifer responded, sitting up straight in his chair. His eyes were all but sparkling.

"You're going on this vacation that the others have planned?" Squall asked.

"Of course!" Seifer beamed. "The Centra coast! The whole gang will be there," he smiled, "I wouldn't miss it. Me, Chicken-Wuss, Instructor Trepe, Messenger Girl, Irvine… and Rinoa." He let that last name marinate in the air before continuing, "have you made up your mind yet, whether you're going?"

"Uh," Squall shook his head, "Yeah. Yeah, I'm going." He looked far away.

"That's great! It's going to be so much fun!" Seifer was beaming now.

"Right, yeah," Squall agreed. "Will be a lot of fun I'm sure," he added, and left feeling like everyone in his life was lying to him.

By the time the door slid shut behind the headmaster, Seifer was biting a knuckle to suppress the shit-eating grin that was trying to take over his face. When he was sure Squall wasn't coming back, he picked up the phone and dialed Quistis' extension. She picked up after two rings.

"Put me on speaker!" he said. Quistis and Zell shared an office on 2F and he knew they were both currently in. He heard a click over the line and an uptick in static that told him he was indeed on speaker.

"Yo!" he heard Zell from what sounded like far away but was actually just across the room from the phone. "You got good news?"

"The best news," Seifer responded.

"Spit it out!" said Quistis.

"Guess which Balamb Garden Headmaster just agreed to go on vacation with us?" Seifer asked rhetorically, "and guess who deserves the award for Best Actor?"

"YES!" Zell shouted, and Seifer could hear cheers and high fives from the other side of the line.

"It's got to be here somewhere," Squall muttered. In truth he didn't believe that – he knew it had been stolen. "Shit," he sat on the curb outside the Salty Spray Tavern in Balamb Town and rest his head in his hands, trying to make the world stop spinning. Maybe it was a good thing anyway – he definitely should not have been driving in his current state. Goddamn Zell and Irvine for baiting him into that last drink. It had been a long night - Irvine's bachelor party - and consisted of a pub crawl from the older Salty Spray where they started with highballs to the Balamb Hotel bar where they finished by sharing two bottles of champagne. In between they had hit a new place called the Green Gable Saloon and had mostly drank beer there – Squall lost count as to how many – before moving on to the hotel bar. There had been a fairly sizable crowd there and Squall, decidedly far past a nice squiffy buzz had climbed up onto the bar in his muddy boots to propose a toast to Irvine and his erstwhile bride, the soon-to-be Selphie Kinneas, nee Tilmitt.

He was tearful and overly wordy about it, and even at the time in his spinning head he knew he would be embarrassed and regretful as soon as he got sober. In the moment that fact actually made him want to keep drinking to delay the inevitable return of his inhibitions – even though this kind of thing was why he almost never drank and when he did he drank in moderation. Not tonight though. He had all but spilled his bodily guts, recounting with tears forming in his eyes from his perch atop the bar that he could "always count on you, man, especially when we killed Ultimecia that was the most awesome shit ever," and that Irvine was "the best shot in the West." The latter of which he thought in his drunkenness was a funny joke but which absolutely bombed as far as the crowd in the hotel bar was concerned. Maybe they were more horrified by the mud stains his boot heels were grinding into the bar than they were by his lame jokes. He even told the entire hotel bar that he thought Zell's hair looked cool. The scene had nearly ended in serious violence when the bartender swept Squall's legs from under him mid-sentence, sending him tumbling over and off the bar, off of a barstool and to the floor in a heap. It was a miracle he hadn't broken his neck. Squall had sprung back to his feet not feeling the pain of the fall, reaching for his gunblade with bad intent as Zell and Irvine stepped in to restrain him. Oh god, the field day the media was going to have with this debacle. Squall slapped himself after that thought, remembering that after Zell and Irvine de-escalated the situation and calmed him down, he had offered the bartender and everyone else present a hundred gil each to just keep the incident to themselves. They had all readily agreed – Squall Leonhart was a beloved figure in Balamb Town and in truth no one wanted to cause serious trouble for him even if they did want him out of their bar until he sobered up and stopped being belligerent. He did sober up a little bit after they left the hotel, and finally they split up. Zell and Irvine had walked to their respective places there in Balamb Town while Squall promised he would get a taxi back to Garden. That was a lie – he had fully intended to drive back.

That brought him back to the present. His car, parked at the Salty Spray where the party had started, was gone. It wasn't entirely a surprising outcome – an expensive car parked in front of a dirthole bar in an old and shitty part of town had apparently been broken into and stolen. What a shocker. In fact, Rinoa had strongly advised him against parking his car in such a place, and had accurately predicted that something might happen to it.

"Goddamn it, Hyne fucking damnit, shit, son of a bitch," Squall cursed gratuitously as he realized Rinoa's inevitable reaction when he got home and told her. There was no way around it, and he figured he should get moving that way so that he could at least bear the worst of it while he was still drunk and it would bother him less. Squall was always more forgiving when he drank – more nice in general, really. Awkwardly nice. Like, 'tell your friends everything you like about them' nice. In short, when he drank he became the polar opposite of his normal self.

He stood up and shook his head a little bit, trying in vain to shake some of the dizziness away, then walked out onto the main thoroughfare and flagged down a cab. In short order he was on his way back to Garden, watching out the rear passenger side window as the Balamb plains bordering the highway whizzed by in the darkness. There were streetlights now on both sides of the highway, all the way to Garden. He imagined that the silhouettes of the trees on the horizon were colossal flabby amorphous monsters, tip-toeing back and forth with grace not befitting their size, whispering plans and schemes to one another in a low guttural gobbling ancient tongue. He closed his eyes and said to the cab driver, "You're a good driver, man. I hope you like what you do. Everyone should like what they do. I'm gonna give you a big tip because I can't imagine what it's like to drive a cab." Goddamn this drunkenness. By the time they pulled up at the entrance to the Garden garage he had sobered up a fair bit – the dizziness wasn't gone but the embarrassing earnestness was. He tipped the cab driver handsomely since he had said he would, and stumbled from the garage to the hallway outside of his and Rinoa's deluxe suite. He stopped outside the door to collect himself, taking a few deep breaths and brushing his hair back before stepping through the threshold, trying his best not to stumble. He stepped through the doorway into the living room where Rinoa was stretched out on the couch in her pajamas, watching a movie with the lights off.

"Hey," she smiled.

"Hey," he slurred a little bit and mentally slapped himself.

"Had a little bit to drink?" she giggled.

"More than I planned on, sorry," he said.

"It's okay, come here," she pivoted and bent at the knees to make room for him.

He walked over and sat down, and she stretched her legs out across his lap. He rest his hands on her knees, hoping the warmth of her skin would give him a mind to think she might forgive him his mistake.

"What's wrong?" she frowned.

"The car got stolen," he blurted out.

She tensed, and sat up a little bit, pulling back and propping herself up a bit more upright on the arm of the couch. "You parked it in front of the Salty Spray?" she sighed.

"Yeah," he nodded.

"Didn't I tell you not to park it there? I told you that was a bad idea but you don't listen," she berated.

"Yeah…" he muttered.

"Actually I told you not to take the car at all, to get a taxi to town because I knew you'd be drinking and hoped you wouldn't be irresponsible enough to drive it back. I assume that didn't happen, at least," she continued.

"No…" he trailed off, his voice flat and dead. "I got a taxi back."

"Well thank you for not driving drunk, Squall," she said, "but I wish I could trust you to be more of an adult. I knew if you parked it in Balamb it would be somewhere dodgy and that it would probably get broken into but I let it go."

"An adult?" Squall spat. "I'm not an adult? How about you get a job, then? Are you going to take over as headmaster of Balamb Garden so I can sit at home and criticize you about every goddamn thing?" Squall wished he had gotten a drink for the road so that he would be a little nicer than he was being right now.

"I…" Rinoa choked.

"Do you know why I don't talk to you, Rinoa? Why I don't want to tell you what's going on with me, what I'm thinking about?" the words were pouring out of him now. He wanted them to stop but he was angry they wouldn't. "This is why. I don't tell you what's on my mind because no matter what it is, you'll nag me to death."

"Squall, I just want you to…" Rinoa started, but he cut her off.

"You advise me against everything I want to do, all of the time, so that whenever something inevitably goes wrong you'll be able to shove it in my face forever," he had stood up from the couch abruptly and was now pacing back and forth across the space behind the couch where the living room met the kitchen.

"You did something foolish, that I told you would be a foolish thing to do, and the car got stolen, and now I'm the awful one?" she asked.

"You exist in a constant state of I-told-you-so!" he retorted. "The only way for me to be perfect would be to always do what you say, a hundred percent of the time. And even then I'm sure you'd find something to nag me about. So why should I even try? Do you understand? Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"I'm sorry I'm such a control freak, Squall," she said flatly. She was full-on crying now, but there were no sobs or chokes. No waver in her voice. Only fresh tears. Despite Squall's reputation for stoicism, it was Rinoa who was the best at it when she needed to be.

"Okaaaaaay," he threw his hands up. "Now you're going to shut down. That's okay. It's what you always do."

"I don't know what you mean," she responded.

"You always do this. There's no room in this marriage for me to communicate my feelings, because if I bring up something that hurts me, you shut down. So I just suffer in silence. I'm not allowed to stand up for myself," he was resisting the urge to put another dent in the refrigerator door with his fist. There was a large one there from the last time they'd had almost this exact same exchange. She had acted oddly for days afterward and he realized then that physical violence had likely been part of her relationship with her father, to some extent or another. From then on he had resolved to vent his frustration other ways. The thought that he might frighten her, and that he might remind her of Fury Caraway in such a way was unbearable to him.

"Do you hear yourself right now?" she asked. "You sound like you hate me."

He had been pacing back and forth throughout this rant, but now leaned heavily backward against the kitchen counter with an exhausted sigh. Gradually he lost the strength in his legs and slid to the floor, back propped against the bottom cabinets, legs stretched out in front of him, with his head rest in his hands.

"Have another drink, Squall," Rinoa spat, and stood up from her spot on the couch. She padded over to the bedroom door, her bare feet quiet against the carpet, and closed it behind her.

To Be Continued...