Chapter VI – Meet Me in the Morning

A/N: Hey everybody. I've decided to go to a two-week update cycle for this story - sorry for not saying anything about that until now. Anyway here's chapter 6.

Rebekka - glad you're still liking it. This is a shorter chapter though.

They say the darkest hour
Is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour
Is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you've been gone

Squall wiped the sweat from his brow just in time to react, and all but pirouetted. He pivoted sideways onto his front foot, right arm and leg trailing out behind him as he half-spun away from the grat's whipping tentacle. Or was it a vine? A vinetacle, perhaps? Whatever it was it was right in front of him, and it was a simple maneuver to bounce back on the balls of his feet like a boxer as he brought his gunblade downward in a swift arc to sever it. Ten years ago, or even five years ago, he wouldn't have had the finesse for such a maneuver. No, seventeen year old Squall especially had been pure menace and brute force. He used his gunblade like a baseball bat then like he was striking with its blunt rear edge hoping to beat his enemies to death with it. It was how he had beaten Seifer twice. Seifer, who had been a fencer who needed to control pace and distance to truly be comfortable. Squall had always been a stylistic nightmare for him – smaller, but doggedly ferocious and with more kinetic force behind his attacks. Seifer as a result was nearly always somewhat off-balance and that was the least ideal thing for him to be. Now Squall was a fencer too, but that old mean streak was still intact and he could revert to it if it was needed. Graying at the temples or no, Squall was in his absolute physical prime now at the age of twenty seven – faster, more agile, and with quicker reflexes than he would ever have again. He was stronger too now, but that trajectory would continue likely for a few more decades until he was in his fifties. Old man strength is a thing. He imagined that if he were still wielding his gunblade by then, he would be back to his old young self again swinging the weapon like a cudgel. He wasn't sure if he wanted that or not. Because even now he felt old and irrelevant, musing on the intricacies of swordplay when the only opponents left to fight were monsters held captive in the Balamb Garden training center like lambs to the slaughter. Certainly Seifer wouldn't be taking up Hyperion to challenge him again. He didn't know if Hyperion was still in Seifer's possession at all, or if it even still existed. They'd never actually spoken about it – at least not in serious enough terms for it to mean anything.

The grat drew back as its vine was cut away, hissing and flailing wildly, and Squall was quick to close the distance. He dove into what would seem to be the arms of the enemy, unafraid like a predator, and finished the job. The grat loosed a guttural sound as the final blow fell, then shook and stiffened and lay still. Dead. Squall breathed deep and drew up his gunblade, spying the greenish grayish slime which now lay across its length staining its cutting edge. He wondered absently if the ichor was more akin to blood or vegetable juice as he held the blade outstretched and gave it a sharp flick. The weapon was sharp and polished and the steel so smooth that the taint ran away and it was left clean and dry.

Then from behind an attack came, and before Squall knew what was happening he had been violently upended. He was sailing through the air out of control not knowing which way was up and which was down. For just a moment he felt weightless, and he almost couldn't feel the same except for once when he had hung suspended in space hoping to catch Rinoa and stop her from being lost forever in space. Now it seemed she was lost anyway, in a different kind of space – one less physical but no less endless and no less black and lifeless to him than that place had been. That was before they found The Ragnarok by pure stupid lucky unbelievable chance – The Ragnarok which had become such a home away from home to him. The first place where he'd held her. Reluctantly, yes, but that was part of the magic now. There are some moments in life, in everyone's life he suspected, which played like a movie. That was one. The way she had kicked off from the deck in the low gravity and sailed so deliberately over his head and then down into his waiting arms. He guessed he hadn't fully appreciated it at the time – so surreal it had been – and this struck him now as a cruel irony that we never realize in the present that we are living the good memories that will sustain us in the endless expanse of wistful longing and monotony of life that wait for us in our older age.

All of this passed in his mind in a moment or maybe less, and it was broken like a dream lost and never fully remembered as he struck the dirt of the training center neck-first. He rolled instinctively and came to rest semi-upright on one boot and one knee and both hands, smarting from the impact with the ground but with his wits at least halfway intact. He had lost his gunblade but in the immediate aftermath of the impact there was no time to look for it because he was staring down the gaping fanged maw of a T-Rexaur with murderous intent. He had a fancy then that this T-Rexaur in particular knew him – that it sought revenge for the generations-worth of torment he and the rest of Balamb Garden had visited apathetically upon this animal's bloodline as it had propagated and seen its successive generations slaughtered for what amounted to little more than meaningless sport. That fancy passed quickly as Squall receded to an instinctive and mindless fight or flight response. It was easy, sometimes even inescapable, for his mind to recede to such a contemplative state as he realized now he had been in since before he had finished the grat. This was all old hat. Well, most of it anyway. Being ambushed from behind by an apparently vengeful T-rexaur had a way of breaking that kind of mindless, sub-conscious space that Squall often found himself lapsing into while keeping his skills sharp. He had read something once in a treatise on combat or on war or something or other, that a novice is deliberate but that a master is transcendently thoughtless. Where a novice moves as though they are themselves, a master moves as though they have abandoned their own body – as though there is an animal inhabiting the master's bodily shell and moving it of its own accord. Squall only finished this thought halfway, and only thought it halfway anyway as he lapsed into the very same kind of thoughtless instinctive animalistic movement internalized from years upon years of obsessive practice of his craft – the craft of killing without thought or remorse or hesitation. There was never a time, not even once, when he had not reflected afterward upon this transcendent fugue state with remorse – but this was all part and parcel of being a child soldier.

These last thoughts were only a whisper, shoved somewhere to the back of his mind in a calm compartmentalized space as all of the conscious aspects of his mind kicked into overdrive. He sprung forward after spotting his gunblade resting in the dirt, collecting it smoothly mid-jump and dodging a subsequent attack from the T-Rexaur in a single motion. Absent of conscious thought he leapt, gunblade now in hand, limit break in effect, and unleashed a series of vicious blows. With the last of these he would seem to leave his body as a murderous upward swipe sent the T-Rexaur soaring upward into space which didn't seem to exist, and Squall with it. There he unleashed the greater part of his power on the now helpless beast with strike after rending strike, and when the last blow sent it downward like a shotgun blast of rent flesh he fell among its remains and came back to himself in a shower of blood and meat. He was breathing heavily as he always did after his most powerful limit break, unable to feel the relief of the battle feeling over. The adrenaline was simply too much. He hated this, and always had. There was not a single occasion of being pushed to his Lionheart limit break in which the aftermath was not something to come to terms with in the dark hours of the night when he might lay awake in bed while Rinoa slept. For him though, there was no peaceful sleep. Not when what amounted to violent demonic possession was a fact of life and of his profession.

The adrenaline began to wear off, and he transitioned from a kneeling position to a sitting one – legs outstretched in front of him while his gunblade rest inanimately by his side oblivious to the carnage it had wrought only moments before. He was tired, but that was nothing new or unfamiliar. He sat there for several minutes simply breathing and trying not to think or to reflect as he had been doing so relentlessly with the exception of the few moments he had spent in Lionheart's grasp. That was, perhaps, why he had never stopped seeking out this experience despite hating its aftermath. Save for Rinoa's embrace he had never known anything so peaceful as those few moments of the absolute white-hot heat of battle in which one does not think - cannot think - but only fight.

"You alright buddy?" Irvine asked, breaking the almost hypnotic reverie the headmaster had been in for what seemed like a mental eternity.

"Yes…" Squall muttered, after a moment of silence to come back to reality.

"You don't look alright," Irvine responded. He was standing a few meters away in the old duster that he rarely wore anymore, Exeter in hand shining in the glare of the overhead lights.

"How'd you get in here?" Squall asked, still somewhat breathless.

Irvine looked hurt but Squall didn't see it. "I'm still a SeeD you know, officially. And I'm still famous," he explained. He didn't need to explain why. Saving the world was an achievement that afforded a lot of perks, and for Irvine coming and going from Balamb Garden as he pleased was only one of many. Free drinks in a lot of different bars was another.

"Right," Squall huffed, and stood up. The cowboy was right – the notion that Garden security would even think of denying entry to Irvine Kinneas without some specific instruction was a laughable one. "So," the Headmaster dusted himself off. "Come to gloat?"

"Gloat about what?" Irvine cocked his chin back, confused.

"You won," Squall answered. "I'm going on this vacation you all planned to scare me into."

"Scare you?" Irvine came back. "Sorry Squall but I don't know what you're talking about."

"Seifer!" Squall shouted. "And Rinoa! You all cooked up this scheme to try and make me jealous of him so that I would go!"

Irvine scoffed. "That!?" He shook his head and looked at the floor. "That was Zell and Quistis. Me and Selphie thought it was a bad idea from the start, that's why we called you!"

Squall blinked and was quiet for a moment. "Well, whoever's idea it was… it worked." He slinked over to a felled tree trunk nearby – a big one – and sat down on it with his head in his hands.

Irvine sighed. "So if you know it was just a big trick, what are you worried about?"

"Trick or not, I think she has feelings for him anyway," Squall said through his gloves. His entire face was buried in his hands now.

Irvine stridently resisted the urge to tell Squall that Seifer was gay. While that would have solved maybe one problem, if Squall was right about Rinoa then it wasn't like it fixed everything. Not really. And to begin with it wasn't his place to out Seifer if he had his reasons for not telling his boss that he liked boys. So instead of spilling the beans, Irvine walked over and sat next to the headmaster, laying Exeter against the log with its stock in the dirt and its barrel pointed up. He placed a hand on Squall's shoulder. Not softly – that would have made it weird. Instead it was a firm hand that gripped him by the collar and gently shook him, finishing with a stiff pat on the back before pulling away. "I know it's hard," he said.

Squall shook his head, leaning forward with his forearms rest just above his knees, staring at the ground like he was looking a thousand miles through it to the core of the earth. "You couldn't possibly understand," he said.

"No," Irvine agreed. "I'm sure I don't. But I know lonely, friend. We talked about that a long time ago, you remember. And I know you." Irvine took out a cigarette. Then he offered it to Squall.

"I thought you quit those," Squall asked, eager to change the subject. He took the cigarette, though.

"Yeah, well…" Irvine left it at that. He took out another for himself, and then his lighter. He lit up and took that first precious drag, then passed the lighter to Squall who lit up himself and gave it back. "And I know what you been through friend, better than you think," he started up again, as though his train of thought had never been interrupted. This wasn't the childlike Irvine that came out when he was with 'Sefie' and Little Irvy. And this wasn't Irvine the lecherous flirt, either. Nor was this the sensitive, self-conscious Irvine Squall had first seen in Deling who couldn't take the shot at Edea. No, this was someone else. He sat there now like he had aged forty years in the space of less than a minute, smoking and looking like a cowboy philosopher leathered by a life of pain and loss and loneliness.

"Way I see it friend is you got two options here," he said. Smoke poured out of his mouth as he exhaled soft and easy before taking another puff. "You got a lady used to be yours, that you're scared might about to be somebody else's. Now you can let her go, or you can do the opposite. But there ain't no in-between, friend."

"What do you mean?" Squall asked.

"What I mean is you either go after Rinoa, let her know you still love her, you still want her," Irvine started. "Or you let her go about her life. But what's more important," he added, "is that you go about yours."

"You mean forget about her?" Squall muttered.

The cowboy philosopher nodded. "If that's what it takes. If that's what you gotta do to keep livin', yeah."

Squall was silent, and the silence was a pregnant one. "What if I can't forget? What if I can't let go?"

Irvine hummed low in his throat and took another long drag. Then he nodded, as if that was the answer he had expected. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and let it hang in the air before he spoke again. "Then I guess your two options just went down to one, friend."

To Be Continued...