Disclaimer: I don't own any of the FF games or their characters/related material (music, gfx etc.). If I did, FFX-2 wouldn't exist and FFVIII-2 would
Author's Note: If any of you don't have the paragraphs displaying properly, please don't review/email me about it because it isn't my problem- I have re-uploaded this chapter with correct paragraphing 3 times and it still isn't working on my PC.
It was over. The very worst thing that he had feared had happened. He had been forced to leave Balamb Garden, and there was no turning back. Ever since his wife was kidnapped, Commander Squall Leonhart, SeeD Class A, Estharian Service Medal First Class, had been looking for anything to take his despair out on. The last time he had done this had been the last time. He had to leave, for his own good and for the good of the fellow SeeDs and students he was supposed to lead. The reason? In the Cafeteria, a student whom he had reprimanded in training for repeated latecoming shouldered him out of the way in the hot dog line, and he had drawn his Lionheart. He had been prepared to use a Class 1 SeeD Weapon against an unarmed cadet. Luckily Seifer Almasy had been walking into the Cafeteria himself at the time and had managed to wrestle him to the ground before he could do the poor kid any damage.
He had to go after that. If he couldn't even control his own temper, then how could he consider himself fit to lead a mobile school-come-orphanage-come-base like Garden? Cid had practically begged him to reconsider, promised to get him counselling. But Squall knew himself that no matter how many hours he spent with Dr Kadowaki it would do no good. He knew there was only one thing that would stop all this, or rather one person. Rinoa Heartilly-Leonhart.
He had put Xu in overall command of the Garden, with Nida newly promoted to Operations Officer, Xu's old role. Had someone told him before his first SeeD mission that he would throw away everything he had ever worked for because of love, he would never have believed them. All he needed to do now was get into Esthar somehow and try to get into one of the numerous search parties that his father had sent out searching for Rinoa and her abductors the moment he heard. Laguna was perhaps the only person, aside from Cid, who understood what he was going through. To lose your wife because you were busy saving someone else's children, through a warped idea of duty and honour. No, he couldn't think like that. Rinoa was still alive, she had to be. He was married to her, for goodness sake, he surely would have felt it if she had been killed. Perhaps not. After abandoning her in the middle of a fire-fight he surely had no right to even consider himself to be Rinoa's knight, never mind her husband.
As he approached Balamb City, he thought for a moment that he had seen Rinoa's stunning black hair, but it was only the receptionist walking back to Balamb Hotel. That wasn't where he was going though, he needed to get out of Balamb before Cid sent out search parties. He walked up to the ticket booth outside the main station, hoping to get a ticket to somewhere on the western coast of Galbadia, from where he would hopefully be able to hire a boat to get him to Esthar. The desk clerk recognised his uniform, if not his face, and asked if he had his SeeD expense card with him. The truth was that he did, but he was disgracing the elite force enough by continuing to wear the battle dress of a true SeeD without making his personal jaunt in SeeD's name. He insisted on paying the full fare himself, and managed to get the second last seat on the train. SeeD still had its own private cabin, but the trains were now much more ordered and comfortable than they had been when he first qualified. Rather than having to stand if you didn't have a cabin, the rest of the available space was filled with high-quality seats not dissimilar to those on Estharian airships. To avoid questions, he took a long cloak out of his pack and wrapped it round himself, concealing everything of his past SeeD status except for the actual shape of the shoulder boards, which were unlikely to invite questions if he kept the SeeD logo and braids covered.
The clasp was however his means of identifying himself to anyone who might know him- it was a copy of his Griever pendant which had a pin attached. The original was with Rinoa, and he hoped that wherever she was, it might bring her some amount of comfort, however insignificant, to have that tiny reminder of him. Thinking about her brought tears to his eyes, but with them a realisation of what a huge mistake he had made. Not in the abandoning of Garden, but before that.
It had been over a month since Rinoa had been taken, and Galbadia had not yet been informed. As Chief of Staff, her father would no doubt spare no expense in searching for her, perhaps even more than his own father. He should have been told. In all his determination to find Rinoa he neglected the one man who had just as much right to look for her as he did. Laguna had only found out when Squall broke down during one of his routine phone calls that had become a bit of a nuisance. Aside from that, he had delayed what could be a significant help in finding her because of his own lack of control. It was beginning to seem as if he couldn't have screwed things up any more than he already had.