Author's Notes:  See chapter one for disclaimer and explanation.

Hidden Feelings, Hidden Fears By Annie-chan Chapter Two:  Nightmares

Laguna looked all around him.  Darkness.

Where am I? he wondered.  Am I dreaming…?

It seemed likely.  All around him was just solid black.  He couldn't even see the floor under his feet, though it clacked under his heels as he walked.  He could see himself perfectly clear if he looked down, so it was as if the darkness was caused not from an absence of light, but an absence of anything around him.  He and the invisible floor seemed to be the only things around.  The only sounds to reach his ears were his own breathing and his own footsteps.

No, that's not right.  He could hear something else, thin and almost high-pitched, as if from a great distance.  It sounded like a child crying.  The wails were so pitiful that his heart clenched, and he looked all around him for the ailing child.

"Where are you?" he called out, and the cries suddenly got louder.  He turned around and saw a little boy crouched on the ground, crying into his grubby hands.  He looked like he was well taken care of, save for the dirt that stained his skin and his clothes, which suggested a rowdy day spent outside.

"Little boy," Laguna said, stepping closer to the child, "why are you crying?  Where are your parents?"  He was alarmed at the nature of the boy's cries.  They seemed to come from deeper in the spirit than any fear or physical pain.  He knelt down and placed a hand on the boys shaking shoulder, prompting the boy to look up at him.  The steel gray that met his sky blue demanded instant recognition.

"Squall…" Laguna murmured in surprise, his eyes wide at the discovery.  This boy…this scared, dirty, crying little boy was his son!  "Why are you crying?  Please, tell me Squall…!"

"He's lost," a voice said behind him.  It was barely above a whisper, but it was perfectly clear even above the boy Squall's cries.  "He wants his mother and father.  But, his mother is dead, and you were never there for him…you were never there for me."

They boy Squall turned back away from his father as Laguna stood up and turned around.  He knew that voice well, though had only heard it a handful of times.

"You left us," Squall, now as he was at present, said, his arms crossed defensively, his eyes narrowed.  "Me…my mother…Ellone…you left all of us."  He was speaking through his teeth, his voice a deadly whisper.  His eyes were cold and unforgiving.

"N-no," Laguna managed to answer, unnerved by the unmasked contempt in his son's eyes.  "No, Squall…that's—"

"You never wanted us," Squall cut him off, almost spitting the words at his father.

"That's not—" Laguna tried again.

"Not what?" Squall interrupted, sounding disgusted.  "Not true?  Is that so?  Then why did you leave us?"  His last sentence was dripping with something that sounded frighteningly close to hatred.

"I…I-I…" Laguna found himself stammering.  The boy on the floor continued to wail piteously.

"You never wanted me!" Squall bit out, his face dissolving into a mask of internal pain.  "You left my mother because of me, didn't you?!"

"No!" Laguna almost shouted, desperate to explain himself.  "I meant to come back!"

"Liar!" Squall cried.  "Liar!  Liar!  You never wanted a child!  You left me to an orphanage because you didn't care enough about either of us to come back!  You never meant to come back!"  Hard tears were streaming from his eyes, and his words were punctuated with the heartbroken sobbing of a discarded child.  "Do you know how hard it was?!" he demanded through his tears, his voice softer though no less pained.  "Do you know how hard it was, growing up with no parents?!  Wondering every night if your parents were still alive, if you were there only because they didn't want you?!  Nobody wanted me!  Nobody wanted to adopt a distant and sullen child like me!  The only reason I left was to attend Garden!  And, even there, I was isolated!  I had become so accustomed to shutting myself off that I couldn't let anyone close to me, even if I wanted to!"  He lifted his gloved hands up to his face and vainly tried to wipe away the tears.  "And, when I found you alive, my deepest fear was confirmed!  My father didn't want me!  He left my mother to die and me to live a lonely and empty childhood!"  He slowly sank to his knees, surrendering to his tears, adding to the cries of the boy crouching on the floor.

Laguna felt drawn to his son.  Without thinking, he stepped closer to him and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.  "Squall…I—"

"Don't touch me!" Squall screamed, jerking away.  "I hate you!  You're not my father!  YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER!!!!!!!!!"

Laguna jerked out of the nightmare with a sharp cry.  He lay there for a long minute, shivering, a cold sweat gleaming in the starlight filtering through the half-closed curtains over the window.

"Ohhhh…" he moaned finally, reaching up and placing his hand over his eyes.  A terrible fear was lancing through him, making it practically impossible to quell his shaking.  He was deathly afraid that this was what his son thought of him, that Squall hated him for never being there for him growing up.  The dream had been so real…

About ten minutes later, the shaking finally stopped and his thoughts finally cleared, he got up out of bed and glanced at the clock.  Almost two-thirty in the morning.  He absently tied a bathrobe on and slipped out the door into the hall.  He half-ran on the pads of his feet down the hallway, barely making any noise, until he came to the door of the room Squall was staying in.  A night guard or two looked after him, puzzled as to why the president was running down the hall in the wee hours of the morning.

He stood in front of the door for several minutes, staring at the painted wood, as if trying to see through it into the room beyond.  Finally, he reached out and slowly turned the knob, pushing the door open silently.  He thanked Hyne a thousand times over for well-oiled hinges.

Closing the door, he looked across the dimly-lit room to the bed, the figure of his sleeping son lying on his back nestled between the sheets.  His arms were up over his head on the pillow, and the covers looked like they had been half kicked off.  He apparently wasn't a peaceful sleeper.  Every few breaths, Squall sighed softly in his sleep, his head turning slightly this way or that, suggesting he was also dreaming.  Suddenly, he rolled over on his side, facing Laguna, and he murmured something under his breath.  "Nnnnnnnhh…Selphie…watch those nunchaku…"  Apparently, Squall had inherited the habit of muttering in his sleep from his father.

Laguna cautiously padded over to the bed and gingerly sat down on the edge.  Hesitantly, he reached out and clasped one of Squall's hands lightly, gently squeezing.  It prompted another utterance.

"Mmnnn…Rinoa, you're breaking my hand…"  Laguna couldn't help but smile softly at that.

He silently watched his son sleep for several minutes, a subdued look on his face.  Squall's pale, young face was peaceful as he slept, with the occasional slight expression corresponding to whatever he was dreaming about.  It was so different from the pained, hateful expression from his recent nightmare that Laguna was sure would be burned into his brain for the rest of his life.  It had scared him so deeply.

Laguna grimaced as his son's words from the nightmare echoed through his mind.  You never wanted me…you left all of us…I hate you…you're not my father…

His eyes started stinging sharply, and his sight blurred as hot tears overflowed down his cheeks.  A cry clawed its way out of his throat, and he hurriedly put his hand over his mouth to stifle the sound.  Regret deeper than any he had felt before had clamped a cold, hard fist around his heart, and was squeezing mercilessly.  Pain stabbed through his chest as he fought to keep from waking his son.

He remembered…he remembered clear as day the moment he had been informed of Raine's death from an infection that set in soon after she gave birth to their son.  He had stood, stunned, unable to move or make a sound.  The news that his son, whose name he had yet to discover, and Ellone were out of his hands and had been sent to a remote orphanage snapped him out of his trance, allowing for his violent reaction to grab hold.  His knees had turned to water…he had fallen to the floor…he was shaking…freezing…pain…pain in his chest…too much…oh, Hyne above, he couldn't breathe

He had woken up a day and a half later in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines that monitored his heart and breathing, an IV tube sticking out of his arm.  Doctors had told him that he had hyperventilated and had briefly gone into cardiac arrest.  Kiros had later told him that his face had looked like that of a man whose heart had been torn out and crushed.

For nearly a year after he was released from the hospital, his wore almost nothing but the grieving color of black as he mourned the loss of Raine, Ellone, and his infant son.  He had almost completely succumbed to his sorrow, and had Kiros and Ward to thank for seeing him through and helping him slowly pull himself back together.

"I-I'm so…so sorry…m-my son," he gasped, the effort to keep from howling and waking everyone in the building almost physically hurting him.  Tears were dripping off his chin and flowing down his neck.  "I should…should never have left…never have left you…never have left your dear mother…oh, Squall, I'm so sorry…!"  The last word stuck in his throat and turned into a keening wail, and he squeezed his son's hand hard.  He reached up and brushed messy brown bangs away from Squall's eyes, and cautiously leaned down and placed a soft kiss upon his son's forehead.

He lived to regret it.

At the very second he pulled away, two tears fell free from the streams flowing down his face and splashed down onto Squall's cheeks.  Squall suddenly groaned loudly, his body moving in such a way that made it obvious he was waking up.

Laguna panicked and fled, not having the sense of mind to stop the door before it slammed shut.  He bolted down the hall, back into his own bedroom, and curled into a ball on the bed, shaking violently as he continued to weep.

Squall jerked awake, almost sitting up.  He had been awoken by a loud noise, he was sure of it, but he wasn't sure what the noise had been.  He then noticed that two tears that had not come from his own eyes marked his cheeks, and his hand tingled as if it had been recently squeezed.  Puzzled, he sat up and turned toward the door, a question in his eyes though he was looking at no one.

"Father…"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The next morning, neither Squall nor Laguna said anything about the night before.  Both seemed to be hoping the other didn't know they knew about it.

They walked toward the weapons museum, which wasn't that far from the Presidential Mansion, in near silence, barely speaking to each other.  This seemed to puzzle the guards.  The Chief of Security had caught wind of Laguna's sneaking out the day before with no escort, and had not been happy with his president.  He had given Laguna a lecture on how important it was to guard his safety at every moment, and had then assigned three guards to accompany Laguna and Squall to the museum.  Laguna had looked like he wanted to protest, but also looked like he had had a bad night, and therefore didn't have the motivation to make his displeasure known.

They paused in front of the museum.  One of the guards, a relatively new kid named Andy Rearick, had accidentally stepped on one of his shoelaces, and bent down with a sigh to retie it.

Laguna didn't know what happened next.  Out of nowhere, all the senses he had fine-tuned during his days as a Galbadian soldier awoke from their dormancy.  His instincts drew his eyes to the rooftop of a five-story building across the street, and he saw the figure of a man crouching behind the metal fence around the perimeter, pointing something long and thin through the chain-link…

He barely had time to register what he was seeing before he blindly lunged to the side, narrowly escaping the bullet that sang through the space his head had occupied not a split second later, smacking into the pavement several feet behind him.  He plowed right into Squall, knocking them both to the ground.

Squall was suddenly crouched protectively over him, Lion Heart drawn from the leather-and-bone sheath that hung on his back, held with the flat of the blade facing the sniper in order to deflect any other bullets.  A loud commotion had exploded in the street, accompanied by the sounds of the three guards' rifles going off in the direction of the sniper, who swiftly disappeared.

Squall grabbed Laguna's sleeve and yanked him up.  "C'mon.  Into the building."  He half-dragged his father through the doors before Laguna could even respond.

The proprietor of the museum, as well as many of the staff and security guards met them, obviously disturbed by the nearby gunshots.  The proprietor said the smartest thing to would be for the president to go toward the back of the building, away from the street, and that the museum's security guards would be on extra alert for anyone suspicious in the building.

Squall, Laguna, and the three presidential guards wove their way through the interconnecting rooms, past exhibits of various types of weapons, until they got to a room devoted to battleaxes at the back of the building.  They were the only people in the room at the moment.  Everyone was still breathing hard from the adrenaline rush the assassination attempt had let loose.

"Thanks, guys," Laguna said to them all.  "Great Hyne, that scared me nearly to death…didn't know if he'd hit someone in the street when he was aiming at me."  He stretched, unconsciously turning away from the other four…

BANGBANGBANG

Laguna jumped and then froze at the sound of three rapid-fire gunshots, followed by groans of pain and three people hitting the floor.  He whirled around and found a pistol aimed right between his eyes by none other than Andy Rearick.  The other two guards, Vince Donovan and Terry McLean, and Squall were on the ground behind Rearick.  Donovan and McLean had both been shot through a kneecap, rendering their legs useless.  It looked like Rearick had narrowly missed Squall's kneecap, but he couldn't stand up any easier than the other two.  Rearick had grabbed Donovan and McLean's rifles and now held them in the hand that didn't have the pistol pointed in Laguna's face, his own rifle slung over his shoulder, hanging by the shoulder strap.

"No!" Squall hollered at Rearick, trying to struggle to his feet.  "You leave him alone, you son-of-a-bitch!"  Rearick turned away from Laguna just long enough to deliver a sharp kick to Squall's midsection, making the president's son gasp in surprise and pain, curling protectively in on himself.

"What do you want, Rearick?" Laguna asked, feeling it was useless, but asking just the same.

"What does it look like?" Rearick sneered.  "You to be dead.  I could just ask you to resign from office, but I don't think it'd be too easy to get you to do that.  It's so much easier to just kill you."

Laguna's eyes narrowed slightly.  "You're from that radical student group at the University of Esthar, right?  The one that seems to think it expressly their job to twist everything I say and do into something that'll make me look bad?"

"If you wanna make us sound like mud-rakers, yes," Rearick replied.  "The public's too enamored with you.  It'll be too easy for you to turn your presidency into a dictatorship.  You'll make this city no better than when Adel was ruling."

"You seriously underestimate my integrity, young man," Laguna almost growled.  "You're too young to have given this any thought.  I'll bet that you and your buddies just want to put yourselves in power.  Am I right?"

"That's what they all say," Rearick snorted.  It was all too obvious that the assassination had been planned for months, and that Rearick had joined the presidential guard as he did ten weeks ago to make sure it succeeded if the gunman on the roof failed.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Laguna saw movement.  His eyes flickered over to Squall for the tiniest moment, and saw that his son had unsheathed his gunblade and was dragging himself over to Rearick.  His eyes were burning, every fiber in his being hell-bent on killing this thrice-damned little bastard.  Rearick saw the almost imperceptible movement in Laguna's eyes, whipped his head around and saw Squall, and…

Excruciating pain exploded in his torso as Rearick fired rapidly four times into him, the bullets punching through his flesh, shattering his bones, ripping into his organs…his entire body collapsed, depositing him unceremoniously on the floor.  Blood suddenly filled his mouth as he coughed, spilling out through his parted lips and teeth.  He would have been writhing in agony if his coughing fit weren't freezing his skeletal muscles up.

As his senses faded, he heard someone screaming bloody murder.  However, it seemed from far away, and he couldn't tell if the scream was out of fear, pain, or fury.

Black.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Squall sat by his father's bedside in the hospital room in the Intensive Care Unit.  His crutches leaned up against the wall near him.  The doctors had tried to keep him from getting up, due to his gunshot wound to the leg, but Squall would have none of it.  His father needed him by his side.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the attack in the museum.  After seven hours of delicate surgery, the doctors had managed to locate and remove all four bullets from Laguna's body, and repair the wounds as best they could.  However, curative spells and potions could never fix all the damage in a body so far gone, and the president needed time to heal the rest of the way on his own.  He had yet to wake up, and doctors had no estimate on how long he would stay unconscious like this.  He may still very well die.

Kiros and Ward had been here as long as could be spared, and they both wished they could stay by their friend's side longer, but the citywide commotion caused by the attack needed to be taken care of, and Laguna was obviously not in shape to do it himself.  The collective gasp from the public when it was let out that the young SeeD Commander, who was also hurt, was the president's son also had to be addressed.  Kiros had told everyone up front the whole story about Laguna and Raine, and why Laguna couldn't raise his own son, so any scandals that may arise from this newfound knowledge would just be the work of people just itching to make everyone in the public light look bad.

Squall squeezed his father's hand again, as he had probably hundreds of times since the attack, looking for any sign of life.  He had gone ballistic when he saw his father fall, his light green button-up shirt stained horribly red.  In a surge of enraged strength, he had leapt toward the assassin and sliced his entire body in half from shoulder to hip with one vicious swipe from Lion Heart.  All he could do after that was clutch his father's grievously wounded body to him, crying bitterly, thinking him dead.  Finding out he was still alive as the paramedics prepared a stretcher for him to be transported to the aid car that had rushed to the museum wasn't much better.  He had seen how his father's body was convulsing in unimaginable pain, and almost sickened from imagining what he was going through.  He hadn't slept at all since the attack.

The doorknob turned and the door was pushed inwards.  Squall barely noticed until…

"Squall…?" Rinoa Heartilly said cautiously as she entered, followed by Quistis Trepe, Zell Dincht, Selphie Tilmitt, and Irvine Kinneas.  All were uncommonly quiet and subdued.  They had all come on the Ragnarok as soon as they could possibly get away from their Garden duties.  Quistis had left Xu as temporary SeeD Commander, as she herself was just filling in for Squall.

Squall got up almost zombie-like from the chair and turned toward his companions.  He tried to take a step toward them on his bad leg, which buckled and dropped him to the floor.  Rinoa sprang forward and caught him before he could hit, holding him gently, stroking his hair, whispering reassurances as he wrapped his arms tightly around her and wept brokenly against her shoulder.  She had never seen him so overcome with emotion before, and it frightened her.  Her reassurances were as much to calm herself as they were to calm Squall.

As soon as she saw Laguna, heavily bandaged, an air mask over his nose and mouth, numerous IVs sticking out of his arms, Selphie broke down again.  She had dissolved into tears back at Garden when she had heard her "Sir Laguna" had been shot and possibly killed.  She threw her arms around Irvine, who stood next to her, clutching at his shirt, crying into his chest.  The substantially taller man gently guided her out of the room toward the small waiting room down the hallway.

Quistis and Zell were silent.  Quistis was always one to look calm on the outside even if she was screaming on the inside, and Zell was so shocked both at the news of the attack and Squall's unexpected reaction when they walked into the room, that he found his normally talkative self at a total loss for words.

The only sounds in the room were Squall's heartbroken cries and the steady beeping of the heart and lung monitors hooked up to the prone man on the bed.  After several tense moments, Squall moaned out three simple words that conveyed all the stress and pain he had been though in the past twenty-four hours:  "It's…it's a nightmare…!"

To be continued…

Author's Notes:  Well, it looks like it's gonna be a three-parter.  It took me a while to write this sucker.  I hope you all like it.  Please tell me what you think of it in a review or at mangareader@hotmail.com, onegai shimasu!