Chapter 4
Quistis didn't know what to think. Disbelieving, she hit the rewind button on the control panel again and replayed the tape. And once again, the same events unfolded before her eyes. In addition to being shaken by the cryptic remarks given to her by that stranger that afternoon, she now had to confront an even more frightening possibility.
"He couldn't have." Quistis whispered. Standing a little ways away, her arms crossed over her chest, the woman known as Xu merely nodded, her face grim.
"Somehow, Seifer got past all our security devices and fail safes last night." She said, her tone clearly conveying her dismay. "This tape of him entering your room is all the evidence we have that he was here at all."
Quistis didn't respond at first. She glanced once more at the footage running on the big screen. She didn't know what disturbed her more. The fact that someone had been in her room the other night, for reasons still unknown, or the fact that it had been Seifer who perpetrated the act… after all that had happened, her thoughts were driving her around in circles, spiraling towards some infinite end.
"How'd you get this?" She asked finally.
"Apparently, some of your 'Trepies' had set up a hidden camera outside your room." Xu allowed herself a wry smile. "For reasons I'm not at liberty to say. But you might want to be glad that they did. The question is, why would Seifer go through all the trouble of breaking into Garden, slipping past the guards, then going into your room to do… absolutely nothing? It doesn't make any sense."
"Maybe he stole something." Nida suggested. He had accompanied both women down to the basement which had been converted into the base of security operations, and had remained quiet up till this point.
Quistis shook her head. "I don't think anything's missing," She said, sounding more than just a little distracted. She traced her long fingers over the image on screen, observing each and every detail. Suddenly, her mind tumbled and took a fall.
Why Seifer? Were you on a mission to assassinate me? Assassinate your best friend?
Best friend? Where had that come from?
"Xu, can you get someone to cover my afternoon classes for me?" Quistis asked, turning towards her friend. "There's… there's something I need to do."
*
Balamb was quiet.
The currents of air were warm as they blew past her face, warm as real hands cupped under her chin. In the past the ocean air had always done wonders to remedy her emotional ills, to comfort her, and to provide her with a wonderful sense of reliving her past. But now, the past corrupted and her mind far beyond repair, she inhaled the sea breeze to no effect. The act of trying to wipe the invisible particles of salt away from her face only rubbed the salt even deeper into her wounds, prompting the further reconstruction of memories. The once soothing breath of nature now only brought her pain, and for that she damned Timothy Atkins, damned Cid, damned Garden, damned Seifer, and damned that stranger with every ounce of despair that had festered in her chest.
To the winds she uttered a silent cry.
Is this how it's going to be? She wondered, drawing her knees to her chest. Will I always be hiding my feelings behind some mask of indifference?
She thought about her friends. Squall, Rinoa, Irvine, Zell, Selphie – and realized that none of them would come close to understanding how she felt. Or maybe they just understood something that she would never understand. Did love fit anywhere in the equation?
No, she told herself bitterly. Love doesn't cure people.
But subconsciously, she knew what an ironic contradiction that was.
Her thoughts were too jumbled to make any sense of them. She could not even remember what she'd come down to Balamb for in the first place.
Casting her eyes towards a few seagulls flying overhead, Quistis wished that she possessed the ability to simply fly away. Enough of fighting. All she wanted to do now was run and release herself from life's tyranny.
And she would've jumped off the docks, if a pair of hands hadn't closed around her waist just then and whispered familiar words into her ears.