Chapter IX – Shelter From the Storm

A/N: Second to last chapter! This one is my personal favorite of the entire story, and the best one IMO in terms of the writing so I hope you all like it.

Rebekka - It did kind of go straight to 11, didn't it? lol

Alessia - I'm surprised but not at all displeased that that's what you got out of this chapter. I wrote it actively trying to make people dislike Squall, particularly because of how different this chapter is. One of my goals with this fic was to explore the duality of the characters and not portray them as perfect, or even particularly nice people. I love that you came away from it in Squall's corner though because that's very unexpected.

Angel - I definitely get your assessment that Squall is OOC, and I worried a bit about it myself. The flipside to that though is that Squall is 17 during the game. He's in his late 20s in the fic and has been under immense pressure for over a decade. That kind of extended stress will change a person. Not to mention his personal struggles since then. I think it would honestly be kind of insane to portray him as the same personality as he was in the game. As I was saying above, what I really wanted to do with this fic was portray the characters' good and bad sides. What I definitely did NOT want was to have a flawless, idealized YA-fiction-style protagonist. I just don't write that way. I write complicated people. Squall is a hard worker but he handles stress by being a callous dick. Zell is dependable and a good friend but immature and impulsive and gets lost in his thoughts. Rinoa has a kind heart but is prone to selfish, childlike outbursts. Seifer is smart and funny but thrives on drama a little bit. Irvine is a good dad but kind of a degenerate flirt. Quistis has a motherly instinct that's both good and bad because it leads her to make some bad decisions on other people's behalf. Selphie is bubbly and bright but there's a dark and violent streak in there too. They're all multi-faceted in-game, and I wanted to do that justice in the fic, and even expand on it. Anyway I hope you enjoy the rest of the fic!

I appreciate everyone's reviews and thoughts.

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
Come in she said, I'll give you shelter from the storm
Now there's a wall between us, something there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed
And just to think it all began an uneventful morn
Come in she said, I'll give you shelter from the storm

"Squall, relax!" Laguna laughed, and grabbed his son by the shoulder pads of his tuxedo jacket. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life!" He was standing in front of the groom, clad in a tuxedo of his own, looking into those stormy gray orbs that reminded him so much of Raine. Those words seemed like a platitude to Squall, but the leader of Balamb Garden yet to take the formal title of Headmaster thought it over for a few seconds and came to the conclusion that not only was his father a walking platitude, but that he meant every clichéd, hackneyed word.

Squall got lost in his thoughts for a moment, and Laguna gently shook the boy by his shoulders. Shook the man. Squall was eighteen, and Mr. Loire had to remind himself that this kid had saved the world – or the entire universe, he guessed. This was after having the leadership of Balamb Garden unceremoniously dumped in his lap by Cid. After being tasked with assassinating a world leader, sparking what amounted to a world war. After storming the beach of Dollet to fight the Galbadian army for his SeeD exam. All of this before he was even properly an adult. If that didn't make him a man then nothing would, would it? But it still didn't make him immune to wedding day jitters - and Laguna was grateful to be around for this day, and this moment. He was grateful that out of all the days and moments of his son's life he had missed, this wouldn't be one. He hoped, and knew on some level, that when all was told this day would be one that Squall would remember more than most. That was a comfort to Laguna, as selfish as he felt to admit it even just to himself.

"I'm just nervous," Squall replied. "It's normal to be nervous…" he trailed off.

"You've got nothing to be nervous about!" Laguna exclaimed, gesturing wildly with his arms as he had a way of doing when he was excited, which to Squall seemed like always. "Rinoa loves you! She adores you! You know what she told me the other day?" he asked.

"What?" Squall furrowed his brow. He hadn't realized Laguna and Rinoa were close enough for anything of the sort that he figured Laguna was likely going to say to have passed between them. Laguna being the overly earnest type he was. Wait… hadn't they been shopping together a few days prior? Yes, he remembered now. Laguna had made kind of a big deal out of it – of taking Rinoa shopping in Esthar. Squall had initially chalked it up to Laguna's characteristic over-familiarity and sincere desire to be buddies with as many people as possible. Now Squall guessed it hadn't been just a shopping trip – that it had been instead an opportunity to talk. But about what?

The "what" in question was regarding Julia Heartilly – Rinoa's mother, with whom Laguna had known a brief romance before meeting Squall's mother Raine. Squall would go on wondering about that until a few years into his marriage with Rinoa when she finally told him. She never could really gauge how he had taken the news – how he felt about it. By then there was a wall between them – one they hadn't yet acknowledged but was nonetheless present and which would grow higher with each passing year until they finally separated.

Rinoa had been suspicious, for her part, from the beginning. Squall had been utterly unmoved, having expected Laguna to want to do such a thing for aforementioned reasons. But Squall had never been all that great at reading people. He was too stuck in his own head. Rinoa had recognized that on some level Squall's assessment was accurate – that Laguna was just an overly friendly guy who would think it no less than expected that he take his "new daughter!" on a shopping trip as a welcome into "the family." That family consisting only of an estranged father and son being nothing more than an inconvenient and temporary reality that would be rectified as soon as they were married, and moreso when they gave him a grandchild. Prospective grandparents being excited for a grandchild struck Rinoa as an odd thing – such enthusiasm for the reality that someone had been raw dogging your daughter. Or that your son had been raw dogging some girl. That was weird. It occurred to Rinoa that for having been absent for the first seventeen years of his son's life, Laguna was a remarkably devoted and committed father to his adult son. Maybe that was easier. Maybe it was a cop-out. Maybe Laguna was a bumbling idiot who loved the idea of a "family" but had no concept of doing the thankless job of actually raising one. That made her think briefly of her own father. She knew early on, though, that this shopping trip was more than that. More than welcoming her into "the family." More than just being overly-familiar. There was something he needed to tell her.

"You like those?" Laguna asked.

"Yeah!" Rinoa answered, holding a pair of bright-red strappy high heels. She had to admit, they were cute. She thought about wearing them for the wedding. Squall liked when she wore open-toed shoes – when they were out, and when they were in. She liked the idea of having him revved up for their wedding night. She blushed a little at that thought.

"Get them then!" Laguna exclaimed. "Anything for my new daughter!"

"Okay," she replied shyly. "Hey, uhm… Laguna?"

"Yeah?" he asked with a smile.

"This isn't just a shopping trip, is it?" she asked. The blush in her cheeks had receded a little bit now as she thought more about Laguna and less about Squall and his appreciation for open-toed high heels.

"What do you mean?" Laguna retreated a little. He looked guilty. In that moment Rinoa knew she was right.

"There's something you want to talk to me about?" she said. It was only half-way a question. Not a rhetorical question. It existed in some indefinable space between honest and rhetorical because she still wasn't completely sure.

Laguna paused, and looked pensive. Contemplative, even. It was the first time she'd ever seen him look serious, if she was being honest with herself. Granted, her interactions with the president of Esthar had been limited to that point. Almost as though he had deliberately avoided her.

"Yes," Laguna answered. His tone was unfamiliar to Rinoa. Would have been unfamiliar to anyone who knew him – maybe even to Kiros and Ward. He met her gaze for a moment and then stared at the ground again. In that moment, he had unwillingly expressed something far beyond what she thought he had likely intended. Years. Years of something. Love, loss, longing. Something. In that moment, they had come to a kind of understanding. Something intangible and indefinable had passed between them. "I don't know… how to say this," Laguna started, "but I didn't think it would be right to let you marry my son without telling you."

"Tell me," Rinoa said. There was something in the momentary gaze she had shared with Laguna that captivated her. Maybe it was a glimmer of what had captivated her about Squall – maybe there was more of his father in him than he would probably want to admit. Or maybe it was whatever remained in her of her mother. Some remnant of whatever had drawn Julia Heartilly to Laguna's gaze from across the downstairs room of that Galbadia hotel where she sat at the piano so many nights looking at him as he looked back. Some echo of whatever had made her write that song. Rinoa didn't know about that, but that didn't matter. Echoes of our parents live in us, even in ways we don't understand.

Laguna hadn't expected to be ambushed in this way. His almost-romance with Julia Heartilly was a secret he had carried alone for over twenty years. That was a long time to be alone with something. It had been a long and arduous process, mentally and emotionally, to decide to tell the truth to Julia Heartilly's daughter – the daughter she'd had with that brute named Fury Caraway. Some part of him had never completely forgiven her for it – not even after he married Raine. Not even after he found out he had a son – when that son was seventeen years old and poised to save the world from time compression. It had taken him that long to put it all together. He hadn't forgiven himself for that, and in truth he never would. Not completely.

"Rinoa," he said, "why don't you sit down?" he patted the seat on the bench next to where he himself had just sat. He brushed a few stray strands of hair out of his face and exhaled. His long hair was pulled back in a ponytail and those stray strands hadn't been enough to really obstruct is vision – he had done it as a nervous tic more than anything. "Please," he added.

Rinoa sat, clasping her hands in her lap. That reminded him all the more of Julia. "What is it?" she asked.

"What do you remember about your mother?" Laguna asked, tears forming in his eyes.

What followed was a conversation in which Rinoa learned things about her mother she thought she had always suspected but had never been sure of. In truth she had never fully considered the reality of either of her parents having a love life outside of, or prior to their marriage. She knew she wasn't unique in that regard – that it was a rite of passage of sorts, coming to that often uncomfortable realization. It wasn't a cruel one, necessarily. But it was one of many similar points in the continuum everyone experiences in realizing that their parents were people before they were parents. This was concurrent with the gradual process of realizing that one's parents are imperfect, and often wrong. That in the disagreements, the fallings-out and the outright feuds they had, that in a reasonable proportion of cases they were the assholes. That was a difficult realization to come to but it was everyone's experience. Well… Guiltily, Rinoa realized that this was in fact not everyone's experience – not Squall's, nor any of the other Fated Children with the exception of Zell who had been fortunate enough to grow up in a real household and not exclusively as a cog in a mercenary organization as Squall and Quistis and Irvine and Selphie and Seifer had. Seifer… where was he? Was he doing alright? More to the point, why was she thinking of him when she was about to marry Squall? She pushed that thought from her mind.

"She used to watch you when you were sleeping," Laguna told his son. "When you were adrift in the ocean before running into Fisherman's Horizon," he explained.

Squall blinked. "She told you that?" he asked.

"We talked about a lot of things a few weeks ago when we went shopping," Laguna admitted, though he didn't give details and Squall wasn't apt to press for them. "She said you look really sweet when you're asleep," he went on, and then laughed and scratched the hairs on the back of his neck. "She said the toughest nuts to crack are always the sweetest sleepers."

That sent an odd jolt down Squall's spine. Toughest nuts to crack. He knew he'd heard something akin to that phrase somewhere before.

"She said she knows because her dog is the same way," Laguna laughed.

"So she compared me to a dog?" Squall gave him an unconvinced look.

"I don't think that's an insult in her book," Laguna shrugged. "Look, you two are going to make a great match." He placed a hand on his son's shoulder again and looked at him seriously. "And anything you need… any advice, any help, I'm here. I'm not quite the bumbling fool I seem. And even if I am, there are still a few things I know."

Squall nodded and looked down at his black mirror-shined wingtips. "Thanks," he whispered.

The wedding was held in Timber in the last standing church in the city – a church of a religion that had died before the Lunar Cry and now had no name. A religion whose only remaining traces amounted to the visual depictions of its creation myth in the stained glass windows that stretched from waist height to high into the rafters. The church was tall and long and narrow. It could have been a three-story structure for its height, but it was only one.

He stood there at the head of the main room waiting for her – Irvine and Zell back and to his left as his groomsmen. He had no best man, only the two groomsmen. Irvine was dressed smartly in a tuxedo that matched Squall's. Zell had opted instead for his SeeD uniform as a kind of passive-aggressive flex on Irvine who was not yet a SeeD then. Zell had been chafed over not being named best man, and this was his response. That was ok – Squall thought the gaudy SeeD formal attire made him stand out in a clownish way. Zell had no idea though. He thought he looked cool.

Across from them, back and to the right of where Rinoa would soon stand, Selphie and Quistis waited with bouquets in hand, both clad in slim dresses colored a soft blue. It was almost the same blue as Rinoa's normal jacket but more pale. They were both bridesmaids – alike to Squall's groomsmen there was no maid of honor. Different, though, there was no passive aggressive dick-measuring in the bride's retinue and the bridesmaids matched in their attire.

Squall looked out at the faces populating the pews of the church – pews which weren't long but were very numerous owing to the room's dimensions. The span seemed to stretch out forever to Squall as he scanned each face, moving from front to back. He recognized the people seated up front – Xu, Cid, Edea, Kiros and Ward, Ellone, the library girl whose name he still didn't know but who had been dating Zell for awhile now. Nida was there, and Dr. Kadowaki. Watts too. Not Zone, but he would be the ring bearer. As the rows progressed further toward the back of the church and the faces got blurry, Squall found that he knew them less. It struck him right away that there was a kind of poetry in that.

The church doors opened, and then the organ began to sing out those familiar notes. Not the ones you may be thinking of. Not the ones played at every wedding since Hyne fell. Not those. The notes the organ sang out instead were equal parts wistful and yet vital and passionate and flashing red with love. The tune became stronger, seemed to swell and gather life and fill every corner of the room. It was triumphant and yet with an undercurrent of something – not sadness, but loss and a beautiful longing. There was a kind of mournful acceptance and yet something hopeful too, as though the past was gone but a future might be built in its empty place.

Laguna wiped his eyes and turned to Rinoa who stood across from him just outside the church doors.

"You're crying," she frowned.

"I'm sorry, it's just this song," he laughed so that he wouldn't sob. That was the one secret he had kept. He got himself together and smiled at her. "Ready?"

She didn't say anything, only smiled back and held out her arm. He laced his arm through hers and they took a breath at the same time and then stepped over the threshold across the plane out of the sunlight and into the church.

Squall was watching the door as she materialized from the formless white light beyond the church doors, joined at the elbow with his father. They were featureless black silhouettes for a moment in the wake of that light – or at least Laguna was. But Rinoa's face he could see even in the blackness. Or maybe he just knew in his mind's eye that when the doors closed, shutting out the light of the outside, the last light to fall on either of them as separate persons before they were joined and became two halves of a whole, that when her face became visible to him that she would be wearing that same smile that had made him fall in love with her on the balcony of Balamb Garden. Then the doors closed, and he didn't see that her hair was down and long the way he liked best or that she'd worn those shoes, or the way her dress hugged her figure, or anything so vulgar as that because there was that smile, on her mouth and in her eyes and in every corner of her body she was smiling at him now. His heart didn't jump out of his chest as he had thought it might when he imagined this moment. There were no butterflies as there had been before she came in. All of that was gone now and in its place there was only a sensation of coming home.

To Be Continued...