Chapter XX – Wall
Shaky foundations...
Will widen the cracks...
All because of one detail.
Seifer felt the scenery pass by as he allowed a frigid fury to fan the fire in his veins.
He first heard the clopping of a steady footfall, then— No, no, no, DO NOT. He mentally willed her to stay away but—
"We need to talk."
"No, we don't," he growled. "We really don't."
He wasn't angry with Xu. Or maybe he was. He wasn't sure what he was angry at anymore. Maybe nothing, likely everything. But Xu was as convenient a target as any. Served her right to come check on him like he was some child. He didn't need to talk – he needed to be left alone. Talking wasn't going to change a thing. Not when Garden already chose and pre-arranged every stupid part of this mindless mission.
"Not eating?" Without invitation, she sat herself down across from him in the leather booth he had chosen as a hiding place amongst the many that lined the SeeD train car. He didn't remove his feet from atop the glossy table in between.
"No appetite, thanks to you." He avoided eye contact by feigning passive interest in a faraway hill. He sensed her trying to read his thoughts.
"I can tell you've got something to get off your chest. Your Instructor warned me you may not be happy about this."
"Am I supposed to be flattered that my dear Instructor thinks she knows me well?"
"Is she wrong?"
He was indeed flattered, but would never admit it to Xu in this lifetime. He gave no response, and opted instead to relieve himself of a small itch behind his ear before crossing his arms again.
"Anchor," she said his new name with an old and familiar irritation. "I won't have you and your pigheaded attitude get in the way of a mission's success. Start talking. That's an order."
Seifer finally turned to face her, but was in no mood to watch his language anymore. "Were you fucking serious? In what world would 'withdraw' ever come up in this kind of mission?" He dove headfirst into the last substantial thing he had heard her say. He had slowly been stewing over it, among other things.
"I hope you know, that at this point in your not-so-illustrious Garden career, the best you should hope for is that nothing happens, so you wouldn't have to do anything to pass."
His long legs swung off of the table, swift without the usual weight of steel-toed boots on the ends. The resulting smack his wingtips made on the floor was nowhere near as satisfying as if he'd done it with his boots. But there were no boots, no Hyperion, no Quistis, no motivation. "Doing nothing is not my style. This is not how I wanted to earn this," he declared.
Xu shrugged a shoulder. "You haven't earned anything yet. And the mission's not up to you. They're assigned – we don't get to pick and choose. Do you always need to do everything the hard way?"
"There's hard, there's easy, and then there's this. No one actually needs us there. We're just extra sets of eyes and ears. Completely expendable."
"This seems to be news to you, but being expendable sort of defines a mercenary," she snapped back. "The fact that you neither recognize nor accept that is exactly why you're unfit to be a SeeD."
"You're wrong. That's not all it is." That wasn't how he saw it – it was never how he saw it.
"Enlighten me."
Far be it from someone as mechanical as Xu to understand the romantic meaning he had always ascribed to being a SeeD. "Maybe I'll tell you if you tell me your name."
"Faking amnesia won't help you."
"I mean your first name, SeeD Shoe, which is obviously not your first name."
"What's it to you? You only need to know one name."
"The fact that there's no widespread usage or knowledge of your name tells me you intentionally keep it a secret. Whatever it is, it's probably something extremely embarrassing. And if it's embarrassing, I wanna know."
"Let me give you some advice, Cadet. If you're asking someone for information they don't want to give, maybe don't give away the reason why you want it. A SeeD would know better than that."
"If this were an important conversation, I would've handled it differently. But hey...it's not like I have to worry about being much of a real SeeD for this mission anyway."
Xu stared him down for his nonchalance. "First of all, you're not a SeeD. Second, this is your exam. Don't you think that behaving unprofessionally might affect your grades just a bit?"
Seifer held up a hand in defense. "Hey, now who has poor listening skills? 'First of all'," he mocked her phrasing, "I never said anything about being unprofessional. Second, you gave us the mission parameters: no Junctioning and no Magic. To me, that sounds a lot like we can't let people know we're from Garden, because SeeDs are the only mercenaries who use Magic and Balamb Garden is the only Garden with approval to use GFs."
He knew from her ensuing silence that he had hit the proverbial nail on its head. Now it was time to hammer it home.
"So, Shoe. What are we hiding?"
Xu's poker face slipped for a fraction of a second at his direct question. "We are not hiding anything."
"If it's not us, then what's the Deling administration trying to cover up?"
"There's nothing to 'cover up'. Caraway and the City both know exactly who we are. They came to us."
"All I'm saying is that something about this whole thing doesn't add up—"
"And all I'm saying, is that everything is above-board with this contract. First you think this is too easy; now you think something's 'off'. Have you been shunned from civilized society for too long? Because not everything's a conspiracy and not everyone's out to get you. Don't be so stuck up your own paranoid ass."
"Shouldn't it be a mercenary's job to be more paranoid? If I don't ask these questions, who will?"
"I thought you would have learned a thing or two after your other failed exams. It's not always your place to ask questions. Follow orders to ensure mission success. It's that simple."
"Oh, sorry, I didn't think you were actually going for 'success' when you decided to put a rookie runt like Aki in charge."
"How can I get this through your thick, bitter skull? These types of things can get political. Usually does. It's best that Garden doesn't get involved so openly, so everything needs to be discreet. Or do you not know how to be discreet?"
"Don't worry about me, Miss SeeD, I can handle discreet just fine."
"Really? Because your record proves otherwise."
"Tch. If we're supposed to be so discreet, then why doesn't the rest of the team need aliases? What if someone looks into them, figures out they're from Garden?"
"They won't. You know SeeD identities are extremely well-protected, unless you get yourself into the business of saving the world or trying to take it over."
There was no end to her references to his past. How was he supposed to put it behind him if people kept bringing it up? "We shouldn't have accepted this job in the first place. Give us something else. When they say 'field exam', it should be a battlefield, not whatever this is. Hell, I'd actually prefer to redo that fucked-up Dollet mission with the comms tower."
Xu snapped her fingers in his face and had the nerve to flick the end of his nose.
"What the h—" He stopped when he noticed her expression had grown grim.
"Pay attention, Anchor." Her voice stilled the air with a sudden solemnity. "You think battles are only fought on grass and soil? You think this is just some fancy soirée? There'll be a lot of important people present. Rooms like those are where the real battles happen. When people don't see eye to eye, these are the eyes that matter, these are the decision makers. Every personality difference and ego clash can affect the way the world operates. If you're looking for bloodshed and hacking and slashing, go start another war."
"Spare me the lecture, I've heard it all from Trepe. Monster missions are in decline, blah blah blah. Most of what we do now are diplomatic peacekeeping crap, and we're training Cadets to ride this upward trend in political missions, hence the snooty etiquette classes and tutorials on how to be 'professional'."
Xu sat back and regarded him, satisfied that he had at least absorbed some of the curriculum. "Then put your learnings to good use. This isn't the way I wanted things to go either, but you know we lost our steady stream of financial support when NORG disappeared during the war. Sometimes you just don't have much choice. Gardens have mouths to feed and bills to pay."
With no argument against this logic, he said nothing and stared out the window again, barely registering the blurs outside.
"You grew up with Cid, didn't you?" Xu patted some dust off of her lapel.
"Yeah." He didn't look back at her. His elbow rested on the window ledge. The trees' movement slowed marginally as the train braked to snake around a bend. "So?"
"Do you trust him?"
For better or worse… "Sure."
"Then trust that he wouldn't make Garden take on something that won't help at least one person in the long run."
It was an unexpectedly soft statement coming out of such a hard shell of a soldier. But Seifer's doubts about Cid's leadership abilities remain unchanged. No, the old man never means any harm, but...
Seifer rubbed the back of his neck where his shirt collar was rubbing him back. "Where the hell did you get these suits? Are they made from sandpaper scraps? I think I'm allergic to subpar quality."
"I'm sure you're lying about that, otherwise you'd be allergic to yourself."
"It's OK, Shoe, don't feel so down. Your comebacks are just terrible thanks to your lack of experience in interacting with intelligent, sentient be—"
"Heads up, dudes!"
Seifer raised an arm to block what came hurtling toward his face. He heard a thud as plastic meet flooring.
"Awww, you were s'posed to catch it, man. That water was for you."
"Zack," Xu scolded. "Settle down."
He settled himself down right next to Xu, who was going to have none of this. She dug her hip into his until he was forced off the booth seat so that she could stand. "I'm going to check on the rest of the team," she announced, audibly bored by her current post. She shot them both a look of warning. "Behave."
As the door to the cabin opened for Xu, Seifer caught a glimpse of Talman and the team poring over some papers. "What's going on in there?"
"Ehhh, not much." The crinkling of the worn leather on Zell's gloves were nearly masked by the clinking of his fingernail picking away at his front teeth. "If you wanna know so bad, go see for yourself."
"You were just in there, you should be able to tell me."
"Nah, man. I wasn't really watchin'."
For a split second, Seifer saw a hint of that familiar grin, the one Zell always had when he knew he was being a pain. Zell threw his arms behind his neck and arched his back, giving his abs a good stretch – he almost purred.
Seifer, on the other hand, kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wasn't good at waiting.
"Out with it," he pried, voice low. Funny how Seifer was now in the same situation that Xu was in with him just moments ago, except Seifer was a more willing participant. Even a blind Cockatrice could see the parallel.
"With what?" To Zell's credit, he looked genuinely confused.
"You know what."
"You mean my gum? I swallowed it earlier by accident. You can't have it now. You might have to wait a while." A shrug accompanied the unimpressive anecdote.
Was Zell avoiding the topic or just really that much of an idiot? Seifer could've sworn it was both.
"Let me spell this out for you." Seifer knew it was coming, but dammit if he wasn't going to be prepared and maybe even preempt it. He was suddenly so tired of people bringing up the past. Did Xu finally hit the wrong nerve? Of course. So he arbitrarily chose this moment, with someone from the earliest of his pasts, to take the next steps to closure. It hadn't really been enough, the way he vented to Quistis the other night. The floodgates wouldn't close again so easily. He needed more progress. All this on the way to his field exam. Bad timing? Definitely. But there would never be a good time – there never had been.
"Today's basically the first time we've talked since...everything," Seifer continued. Once again, he tried to play the game on his own terms, to dictate every question and answer. "You honestly have nothing you wanna say to me?"
A hand ruffled through blond hair. "Umm, OK...? Like what?" Zell's reply was met with a look that he didn't know what to do with. He didn't know what Seifer wanted from him. He racked his brain for the polite thing to say. "How...are...you...?"
"No."
They stared at each other, and it was mostly Zell who couldn't keep his eyes trained on his persistent conversation partner.
Seifer started again. "Don't make this more awkward than it has to be."
"It...this ain't aw—" His gloved hand never made it to his face. Seifer's arm had shot across the small table. Zell felt fingers closed around his wrist in a steel grip.
"Don't. Touch."
Zell was relieved that at least one of them had the sense to remember the makeup. Despite the nostalgia he felt about how Seifer knew him well enough to recall his tendency to touch his face and head a lot when thinking, the situation didn't feel any simpler. Zell let out a high-pitched wheeze of a sigh. "Dude, you know what? You're the one makin' this uncomfortable. There's nothin' to talk about."
"There's a whole war's worth of shit to talk abo—"
Zell halfheartedly wriggled his wrist to escape the hold, very surprised that Seifer let go at all. The Seifer that Zell thought he knew would've held on until he cried for mercy and subsequently called for Xu. It felt so strange, seeing this person who was not quite a friend, but so much more than that. "We were all there but we got out alive. That's what matters, right?"
"No thanks to me, so why do you act like everything's fine? That nothing happened?"
Frustrated, Zell tilted his head backwards and rested it on the low back of the booth, but only briefly. He then sprang up toward the table and planted both elbows on the glossy surface. His stare was dancing on the verge of being watery. "Yo, maybe we're all just trying to cope and be happy, can't you see that? Some of us are just tryin' to move the hell on. Sometimes it's nice to pretend and want things to be like what they were before all that crazy crap went down. I mean, even Squall ain't mad and that's sayin' something considering...you know."
"Wouldn't it be easier for you all to hate me for what I did? Or even just hate me the same way you did before?" A masochistic part of him would rather be hated than to have the world forget the things he'd done. He didn't want it all to mean nothing, amount to nothing. Even hate was...something. Xu still very clearly disliked him, and despite her relentless reminders of his misdeeds, he felt more comfortable with that than whatever the orphanage gang was subjecting him to. He hoped it wasn't pity, but it sure felt a lot like it.
"Hey, I…yeah, I was mad. I was so mad. We all were. And you made it so easy to be mad at you. But eventually we kinda accepted that you made your choice and you were sticking to it. Nothing we could do to change it. And when we found out about where we were from, it—maybe you just don't understand, man. Like...ever since we remembered the orphanage, I wanted to remember more. And what I remember most is you an' me. Fighting. A lot. You were always starting stuff. That feels normal to me, so...I think I kinda feel happiest when we're doing that, you know?"
He did know, and always did suspect that may have been why he never, ever stopped bothering Zell. Force of habit, force of nature.
Zell breathed deeply before his next confession. "And I don't hate you, man. We never did. We were angry, yeah. And you always screwed up my hair. I take a lot of time to do it, you know, but it only takes you a second to mess it up."
Story of my life. Spend years building a life at Garden, takes me no time at all to tear it all down. The life and Garden.
"I mean...I get it. I get what you did," Zell went on. "We all do. If my Ma turned into a sorceress, I mighta done the same thing."
Seifer wasn't so sure that Zell would have or could have done quite the same things. Publicly kidnap and hold a president hostage, repeatedly torture a childhood rival, resurrect a weapon of mass destruction, or callously shove your ex-girlfriend at a witch fresh out of a space coma.
Of course, it was never clear how much of that was the real Seifer and how much was the pull of sorcery. Maybe it coaxed out parts of him that had never fully seen the light, the way a small stick twists and turns to extract parasitic worms from beneath the skin. When the worm finally showed, then the man could truly live again.
Or so he thought. There were times in those days when he saw little difference between man and worm. Lesser still when he lost the wars – the one with his own so-called family at the centre of it all and the one at the centre of his soul. He had drifted from one moment to the next, his posse reduced to only Hyperion at his side. He sat in alleys and on barstools and on hotel balconies and in every darkened corner only to watch the living with his own dead eyes, scanned for danger and hatred and found that most people had already succeeded in putting him out of their minds.
His eyes and ears had gravitated toward the news, not to keep up with current events but because a part of him wanted to know if they were still talking about the Sorceress's Knight. The footage of him and President Deling at the station was overused and probably now in some instructional video as an example of poor presidential security. It was no surprise that news anchors never once mentioned his triumphs or strategic brilliance, but only focused on his mistakes and betrayal. The only attention he garnered were from bitter cadets and SeeDs in Garden halls, who bothered to looked up at his tall frame only to look down on him. They pondered aloud about "who would let a killer roam the streets?" but they eventually left for their own missions to slowly rack up their own kill counts. Everyone was a hypocrite.
Zell had watched Seifer grow quiet. He was about to say something, to end what he didn't know was one of Seifer's commonplace spirals of regret, when the cabin door slid open with a beep.
Seifer's brows moved toward the sound but his body didn't follow. His mind welcomed the distraction. In contrast, Zell completely bolted out of the booth, fists at the ready, as if he could fight the perturbed glance Katya was shooting in his direction.
"Hey, Se—Soren. Captain Aki wants to see you inside."
'Captain Aki'. Didn't think the shortest joke in history would only be two words long.
"What for?"
Katya hadn't expected any questions. "Um, I guess...uh, please come in and he'll explain?"
Fine.
Seifer stood, and his legs slightly itched from rubbing against the suit pants. He looked over at Zell and jerked his head toward the cabin, signalling for Zell to go in. Zell puckered up his lips and followed.
The colour of the coffee table in the cabin was indiscernible beneath the spread of paper stacks and manila envelopes. Talman's suit somehow still looked crisp and unrumpled. He addressed Seifer in a curt tenor.
"Cadet Anchor. Nice to have you finally join us."
Seifer did not appreciate the insinuation that he was late to something he never even knew was happening. If they wanted him inside, they could've called for him earlier. This was probably punishment for leaving the room in the first place. His response was a stiff glare that Talman locked his eyes on for only a second.
"Please look these over," Talman requested, gesturing to the smorgasbord of suspect profiles laid out on an unsuspecting table that knew nothing of the weighty intel it supported. The other SeeD candidates were also leafing through the packages.
"Why do you care if I read them or not?"
Talman's face told him that he was expecting to face some opposition from Seifer. The Captain pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his long nose with a finger. "My team should be prepared. Unless you're feeling so confident that important details don't matter to you?"
'Your' team. Tch.
They clearly had different ideas of what constituted mission prep. "Do you want to cloud your judgment with pre-existing bias? I don't wanna be so hung up on these people that I miss suspecting someone else who isn't in this pile. And what if we're making decisions founded on false information? How do we even know these are even facts?"
"We don't necessarily know. That's where professional discernment comes in."
"Where did this data even come from?"
Talman looked to Xu and the SeeDs, who sat off to one wall and were engaged in their own hushed conversation. Xu had been eyeing this exchange since Seifer came back into the cabin. When she caught Talman's gaze, she said, "The Deling Administration supplied the background checks."
Two eyebrows lifted themselves above the frame of Talman's eyeglasses as if to say, "See?"
Not good enough.
Seifer went for it. "How much should I bet that I won't find a certain sorceress in these files?"
The air in the room suddenly stopped moving at the mention of a supernatural element in these otherwise very human affairs.
Sterling couldn't quite make the connection."Why would she be?"
"Aren't you always supposed to suspect family first? She's got motive – everyone knows she hates Caraway."
"But she has an alibi, doesn't she?" Katya reasoned. "She's with the Commander. They've been away and aren't back yet."
Words slipped sarcastically, casually, deliberately through a smirk that addressed the entire room. "You know, that's just so interesting to me. How people seem to love to conveniently forget a sorceress has control over space and time."
Xu piped up from behind her newspaper. "She's with Squall, you think he'd let her?"
"You underestimate the sway of a sorceress." Everyone does. That was always the first mistake, the first step to ruin. "How do you know Leonhart isn't in on it? He'd do anything for his princess, even jump into deep space."
Talman saw an in. "You just have something against her because she left you for the Commander. We all know what happened."
Of course they knew. Everyone who was anyone knew. Swift judgment from strangers who neither knew nor cared to look beyond the surface was just another consequence of a highly televised existence. Seifer spat out an incredulous laugh. "I'm glad you think this is all so simple."
A small corner of Talman's mouth curled upward. "Speculation or thoughts of institutional treason doesn't help us right now. We could conjecture all day, Cadet, but it won't narrow things down in any way that's useful. I say we stick with what we have and we'll reassess the situation if and when we need to."
Well, isn't someone just settling in fine with his role as leader.
Seifer decided to play along with the stacks in front of them. He also wasn't about to be at a disadvantage if this info were to actually come in handy. He picked up a folder and flipped through its contents, eyes only scanning the top halves of each sheet – clusters of data that still smelled like the budget printer they were birthed by. Ten seconds later, he snapped the folder shut and reached for another.
"What are you doing?" Aki sounded more confused than annoyed as Seifer did the same to the second folder before going for a third, like someone simply reaching for his next drink at a run-down bar in Timber.
A lazy smile as fake as his effort crawled across Seifer's face. "I'm just doing what you asked, Captain. I'm 'looking these over'."
"You're not even reading any of it."
"How do you know I'm not a speed reader?" And who was Aki to judge this book by its tattered covers?
"Don't bother then, if you're going to be like that. Either take it seriously or leave those alone."
"No, thanks. As if there's anything better to do in this metal heap."
He finished with the third and tried to move on until he saw – nearly hidden beneath the paper pyre – another file folder that looked pristine. One that clearly no one had yet rifled through. He tugged it from its place at the bottom, letting his palms slide across its smooth surface. He could see Xu's head moving in his peripheral vision.
Seifer opened the folder haphazardly, eyes narrowing as his fingers flitted through the top corners of each page. An eyebrow almost lifted, but he didn't want to give away his thoughts. He looked around him at the rest of the SeeD cabin passengers, then back down at the folder sprawled like a lapdog on his thighs.
Hmm.
It was nothing but white noise.
White noise that filled the room, the space between the floor tiles, the gaps in the walls, her ears, her head, her lungs. White noise that mixed with dark thoughts in a chaotic tangle.
And it was like this every time. It was her way of blocking out everything so that she could fixate on only one thing:
How she would tell his loved ones.
"It happened too fast for us to understand," said the doctor on duty, whose name tag was not quite hidden behind a lock of black hair. Quistis's eyes saw that it read A. Deling but her mind only saw Adel and it reminded her of more death. She knew she was being irrational but she feared it all the same.
Quistis only meant to drop off Corbin and Luella so they could be tended to. She hadn't expected to return to one fewer soul in the lab clinic. "Dr. Steinway informed me just yesterday that they'd survive. Those were his words—" that Quistis had subconsciously committed to memory, just for some fraying shred of hope to hold on to.
"So much can happen in a few hours. Minutes. And 'yesterday' was many, many minutes ago." Dr. Deling stood at a console, typing and entering text into fields with habitual ease. Her bedside manner was half a galaxy away from Dr. Steinway's relatively-more-cheery approach. Quistis mentally gave her the benefit of the doubt and attributed the doctor's attitude to the stresses of the job. After all, Quistis herself knew a thing or two about stresses and stressors.
"How recently did his condition worsen? He was still all right when I called for a status report this morning." If the tide could turn so quickly in an environment much more controlled than the field, and everyone had been exposed to similar threats, then…
"About three hours ago. There's nothing more anyone could've done. We tried everything except Magic, because we're not Junctioned."
"What of our other—"
"She's fine. I know what you're thinking. They had the same thing, same symptoms, nearly the same levels of Magic saturation, so why him and not her? Here's what I want to know: Was there anything he did that she didn't do, or vice versa? Uncommon Magic they were subjected to?"
Quistis was afraid it would come to this, having to make speculations even though there were too many unknowns. "The team used nothing out of the ordinary, but Magic in the Dead Zones doesn't seem to be what it usually is. It's not reasonably feasible to track what Magic, if any, were used by the monsters in that area."
"Umm, if it helps..." Selphie began, tentative but hopeful. "He was in my group and I saw that he did try to summon a GF. Does that change anything?"
Dr. Deling threw her gloved hands into the air. "Ahh, right, the GF! That explains the brain activity we're seeing." She stepped back toward the body on the bed, and adjusted a few dials on the machine still hooked up to the departed SeeD.
Quistis perked up in her state of confusion. "...brain activity? So he's not dead?"
"He is."
"But the br—"
"Yes, we're reading brain activity but it's not...normal."
"But if there's still something, does that m—"
"It may not be human. It could be the link to the GF. When you summon, you're basically accessing a different plane of existence temporarily. The very act of summoning takes the human mind somewhere it can't comprehend."
Quistis knew at least this much from her own experience and research, that this was why summoning takes so much concentration. "How can we know that this is related to GF usage? It could be an atypical phenomenon we've never seen, or a side effect of the Dead Zones—"
"Miss. I'm sorry. I know you don't want to hear this, but we really don't know more, and he's really dead. That's why the fact he has any brain activity at all is baffling." Dr. Deling showed them the heart monitor to illustrate her point. "The patient's heart stopped – he's clinically dead. We tried to resuscitate but there was no response. When the heart stops sending oxygen around, brain damage happens within minutes – and his heart stopped hours ago."
"Were our teammates not under a close watch to prevent something like this?" Quistis wasn't sure where to direct her frustration. All the more reason for Corbin to stay here, to monitor the others if the clinic personnel could not.
Dr. Deling dropped her body onto a nearby chair, then filled the air with a deep sigh. "We've been understaffed and preoccupied all morning." She closed her eyes and massaged a knee with one hand. Her few strands of grey hairs disappeared under the unforgiving white gaze of the overhead fluorescent lights. "One of Odine's teams were airlifted in, needing emergency care. They even lost one of their people. And by 'lost' I don't even mean 'dead'. They just straight up lost a guy. Can't find him. We're all dealing with a lot here, in case you haven't noticed."
Quistis felt a small pang of guilt as she glanced around the spacious clinic. Through the large window of an adjoining room, she saw a flurry of activity as a team tried to resuscitate a man in a bloody lab coat that was barely still intact on his body. The doctors and nurses were the model of detached indifference in the face of this life-or-death scenario. "Is there any way we can help…?"
"Well! Since you asked," Dr. Deling's sarcasm was not subtle in the slightest. "If you SeeDs had been faster with clearing the areas, we wouldn't have been in this situation."
Quistis interpreted the barely audible gasp behind her as Selphie's jaw almost touching the pristine floor tiles. She knew what must be screeching through Selphie's mind: "Who does she think she is? Odine's soulmate? How dare she!"
"If I may ask, Doctor," Quistis began her defensive maneuvers. "Why the rush? Dr. Odine assigned us to clean up very specific areas. It makes little sense to still be sending in scientists to any place that has not been cleared. We've really only just started. Today, we did not see anyone else when we were on the field. Therefore, I can only assume that they must have been working in the areas that we have not reached yet. Is that where they were?"
"They were up north. Somewhere between the Mordred Plains and the Vienne."
...what?
Quistis recalled seeing the looming figure of the Vienne Mountains in the distance when they fought the Gayla. And only now did she remember Dr. Odine saying that his scientists were already there. Something seemed...off. "Just now, before we returned here, we were on the Plains. Yes, we have not advanced as far as the Vienne yet, but there is nothing but flat land between the Vienne and Nortes Mountains that flank the Mordred Plains. If they were there, we would have seen them. So where were they?"
"You're asking the wrong person. That's where I was told the drop-off point was. They've been there for days, so who knows? Maybe they made it into the mountains. I don't know any more than that. All I know is they were very lucky they didn't run into big issues sooner."
When Quistis didn't seem entirely satisfied with the answer, Dr. Deling stared up from her slouched form on the chair. "Listen: I don't care where they were before they were my patients. My first priority is to treat them. We don't know much of what's happening out there because most of the witnesses don't survive. We only see the consequences. We haven't had any time to even try to figure out the root causes of some of the weird things we're seeing. We're doing our best to keep up and learn as we go. From what I've heard, Odine has a schedule to keep, and the data he needs to collect is essential for this project to stay on schedule. Odine probably sent them into those areas because he couldn't wait any longer."
Another red flag. Why would a research project on Time Compression need to run on such a tight schedule? What information are we missing? Quistis wanted to pose the question to Dr. Deling, but feared that it would once again be "asking the wrong person". Her mind harkened back to the last conversation she had in her dorm.
What if Seifer was right to be concerned?
There were too many questions, but she asked one more all the same. "If there are such pressing matters, why didn't the request for SeeD come earlier?"
The doctor sprang from where she sat, like a Torama preparing to strike on a whim. Her hard eyes grew darker than the black of her hair as she spoke into Quistis's face. "Don't ask me as if I have any say in any of this. None of us do. We all feel the same way." Her voice was a bowstring that had been pulled to its limits, waiting for a worthy target for release. "Odine hasn't paid any attention to any of our warnings since day one. Jack and I have been running ourselves and our teams to the ground for several consecutive months now, with no end in sight. And still, Odine is reluctant to bring in more people because it'll drive his costs up, and he needs the money for Hyne-knows-what-else coming down the pike."
"Dr. Steinway had said that President Loire was supportive of this project. Why would there not be more funding available?"
"Because Odine has already gone over budget and he's too proud to ask the President for more money. Who. Knows. All I care about is that this means no extra scientists, no extra help in our clinic."
"But Dr. Odine still hired us, even though SeeDs are expensive?"
"He sees SeeD as a last resort, and that was only after people kept dying at the test sites and on OUR. FUCKING. OPERATING TABLES."
The doctor's words echoed around the room, and Quistis hadn't noticed that everything had fallen silent save for the steady tone of the heart that had given out.
Dr. Deling heard it behind her too, but she didn't turn to look. As if not looking and not acknowledging another departure would make it less real. She studied the SeeDs with a blank look on her tired features, and gritted her teeth before dismissing them, much softer this time:
"There are a lot of things going on that are beyond our control. The more momentum this project picks up, the harder it'll be to stop. It'll only move faster from here. You kids want to help? Get back out there and do your job. But be careful. Please."
The doctor walked away, pulling off her gloves and tossing them into a stainless steel receptacle stained with blood on the inside. Quistis thought she heard Dr. Deling mutter a brief prayer as she donned a fresh pair of latex gloves:
"These are just children. Hyne, please spare the innocent..."
Author's Notes: It's been almost 1.5 years but finally, we have an update! In the next chapter, we'll be getting to some parts that I've had outlined nearly ten years ago. There are some scenes that may end up being irrelevant, but I want to figure out which those are and skip those for the sake of getting things written and posted.
2018 was an insane year for me, and I hope that I'll have more time and energy to make more frequent updates to both fics. If you're following the other one, the next chapter is so close to being finished. Thanks for reading and waiting. I always appreciate all comments and feedback. I hope you still like this piece, and are enjoying where it's going. :)
Update (September 15, 2020): I'm in the editing stage and I'm very excited. I know it's been a long time coming. I may be able to post before the weekend. Thanks again for your patience as I continue working on the next chapter, and if you need some more to read, try out my other fic "Lessons Learned" (also still in progress)! Thanks for your perpetual patience, and I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. :)