Chapter Twelve:
Oh, I woke up in hell today
I woke up depressed and drained
But that's okay 'cause
I promised not to hurt you again
Apparently I'm to blame
But apparently I've been framed
My memory that won't help me
When it's happening
Out of mind out of soul out of light out of control…...
Oh, I promised you I would change
I'm an asshole, and I'm ashamed
And I'm upset 'cause I betrayed
Everything that you gave
Will you ever let me explain?
Can I beg you to let me stay?
Don't quit me 'cause
I'll never let this happen.
Our Lady Peace-Middle Of Yesterday
And Seifer woke up.
He rubbed his scar, absently.
He vaguely remembered having had a dream. He sorted though memories, trying to remember what it had been about, but the remnants slipped through his fingers like water.
It had been..important.
All he remembered was a beach. There had been someone else. They'd fought.
He'd won. Of course he'd won. He always won.
Seifer smiled.
It felt good for a change. At last he knew what he was going to do.
Behind his eyes mist swirled and rolled among old dark trees as something deep inside him beat its hands convulsively against the onslaught of memories and darkness and fire, swearing and shouting.
He knew things. Knowledge was power, and power sang through his veins like fire, like electricity and heat and alcohol and ice all at once, jammed into some unholy cocktail with the kick of a mule and the energy of a dynamo.
He set off down the corridor. A casual observer would have noticed that he seemed to carry himself in a different way, and that his walk had changed from abstracted angry wandering to purposeful and direct.
"Hey."
Quistis glanced up from her protocol manual, rubbed her eyes, knocking her spectacles off, slightly, and gazed up through the smeared lenses at Seifer, outside the cell.
He looked slightly different in a way she couldn't put her finger on, leaning against the wall and wreathed in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. He seemed to have washed, so maybe that was it. At least the permanent five-o-clock shadow had gone, his hair was cropped very close to his head, almost shaved, and there was a number of small cuts on his face that indicated he'd done both with a knife. His eyes looked very dark, either tired or worried. She couldn't decide.
He stepped closer to the bars, boots scraping on the flags. "You okay?"
Duh. "About as good as I'm going to get." Quistis gestured for him to be quiet. "You shouldn't wake them up. "
Pointing to the three Galbadian soldiers curled on the concrete around her, she rose and moved closer to the bars, treading carefully and nearly silently around them. "You're not exactly flavour of the month."
"Am I ever?" Seifer grinned wryly around the cigarette, inhaled and let the smoke out in a soft breath. Up close he smelled of cigarettes and gunpowder and leather and less of unwashed feet.
"You washed."
He stubbed the cigarette out on one of the bars, flicked the butt away and rubbed the back of his neck absently with the other hand. "Yeah."
"Did you see the thing? Is everything all right?"
Seifer stepped closer, gesturing her to move in. He leant his head slightly to one side, taking in the good five-inch difference between their heights, and spoke softly, almost in her ear.
"Yeah. It's all okay."
His spoke into her hair and she leaned forwards into him, with the bar pressing into breast and belly between them. It wasn't a gesture she would normally have made, but hell, it was late, and she was tired, and he was warm and safe, or at least safer. He slid a large hand round the back of her neck.
"We're going to get out of here, I promise."
She felt the words rumble in his throat as he slid the other hand round the back of her neck, forehead almost touching hers.
She glanced up, almost shyly, into brown eyes.
This wasn't like him. But right now, she really didn't care. It was late, or rather early. She was tired.
Weren't his eyes green? And then the thought, as well as all others, scattered out of her head as Seifer kissed her. Hard. It wasn't a reassuring kiss, or a sisterly one, or even a nice one. His hands knotted hard behind her neck, pulling her into him and she tried to push him away, because this really wasn't the time.
He leant back against the wall, releasing her, and then smiled
"I've been waiting to do that for five years. Or rather, he had." He smiled, a grin that seemed much more sinister than Seifer's normally cynical or nasty smirk and not in the least bit reassuring. His teeth seemed more prominent in the half-light, more pointed.
"Seifer?" Quistis may have occasionally wondered abut Seifer's sanity in the last couple of years, but she'd never imagined that he'd go so low as to speak of himself in the third person. She scrubbed at her lips with a corner of her uniform, tasted blood.
"Live for the moment, Instructor. I'm tired of living every minute like I'm under a death sentence."
"Seifer, you ARE under a death sentence. And I'm beginning to think that might be a good thing." She stared at him hard. He looked different, apart from the lack of dirt. His body language was foreign in a subtle way, and although he was still smoking, she didn't think he'd used any swearwords in the last ten minutes. This was unusual for Seifer, whose sentences were usually punctuated with swearing in the same way bars of chocolate were punctuated with nuts.
Quistis squinted at his eyes. As far as she could see between the shadows they still looked abnormally dark, which okay, could have been just lack of sleep, but there was something … guarded ...about his manner.
Compared to Squall, Seifer was an open book, if one with very short sentences, swapping between one of three moods, smirking, scowling and slightly manic. And she'd usually been able to tell what he was thinking. Right now, she couldn't. It was like he'd suddenly acquired three extra layers of personality. Something clicked.
"Oh, Hyne."
"Penny dropped, Instructor?"
He could say that again. It felt like a whole truckload of the damn things had just landed of her head. She mentally kicked herself for not noticing anything sooner. When the fuck was her gun? The whip would never reach that far. Yeah, like she hadn't though she'd need it, just in a haunted castle. Quistis turned her head and caught a glint of metal tucked in the side pocket of her bag.
"Be my guest." Shadowed and leaning against the wall, he gave a kind of indulgent smirk that made her fists itch.
Quistis crossed the room in two long angry stalking strides and caught the gun up, checking it was loaded without looking, her hands flicking though the well-practiced movements in a kind of unconscious semaphore as she kept both of her eyes and all of her attention on the man in front of her.
Now. She could go for the direct approach or a more diplomatic route, testing the water gradually instead of plunging straight in.
The delicate little dances of politics, the cut and thrust of words instead of weapons as people avoided saying out loud what everyone knew only too well and discussed behind closed doors, were essential for any SeeD with ambition to understand and like almost everything else in her short career Quistis had learned them well. However, if she was dealing with the real Seifer, he wouldn't understand dancing round the point anyway, and if what she was suspecting was true, it was pissing her off way too much for her to bother with any of that kind of diplomacy. Fuck it.
She swallowed and spoke softly. "You're not Seifer."
"True. Now aren't you going to say something like "You'll never get away with this?""
Quistis drew back from the bars to stand as far away as she could get without treading on someone's hand. "Not if you want me to. I'm never nice to people anyway, let alone to people who are using my friends' bodies like ventriloquist's dolls. You haven't even got an excuse for me to be nice to you. And he is SO going to kick your butt. I'll wake up all these and we'll find a way to break out of here. And kill you." she added, almost as an afterthought.
"Really? Because I'm sure they'll believe you if you tell them that your 'friend.' really is being controlled. What am I saying? Of course they will. And their response will be damage limitation and Almasy will have a lifespan shorter than a snowflake in hell."
Seifer leant back against the wall and took another drag in such a familiar manner that Quistis started to doubt what he, what it, had told her. Maybe he was just playing some evil little mind game. Politics rather than punching had never been Seifer's modus operandi, but maybe he'd matured. Whatever it was, it was making her trigger finger itch like hell. It was confusing her, and Quistis hated being confused, because it implied some kind of mental deficit, though to be fair it wasn't something that happened often.
"In fact, I'll be nice and let him tell you himself." It, him, whatever, gave a nasty smirk that was still unmistakably Seifer's. She'd seen it many times before, back at Garden, when he'd still been in charge of the Disciplinary Committee and one of the few people, that could piss Squall off, and Squall had just sat there as Seifer taunted him, with whitening knuckles and a look on his face that meant that he was trying hard to avoid jumping up at Seifer and strangling him. Sometimes it had worked. Squall's self-control was legendary.
It had exactly the same effect on her, a grin that made her want to bruise her knuckles on his teeth.
Quistis opened her mouth to tell him to get lost when he broke in. "You have five minutes."
And his expression changed.
It was like watching a shadow pass very swiftly over water.
Seifer blinked, looked slightly startled and rocked back on his heels, slamming one arm against the wall to stop himself falling. He reached for the bars with his other hand, face still shadowed, and Quistis took a smooth step back as her hand went straight to her gun. Her other hand moved to Save The Queen.
"Get the hell away from me, you bastard."
"Quistis, listen. Put the gun down." Seifer rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "Fucking bastard. I'll kill it. I'll fucking kill it." He sounded tired, and also very angry.
"Prove you're you." She folded her arms over her chest.
"What do you want me to do, beg? Cos if I do that, you'll know it's not me."
She thought for a second and beckoned him over. "Come here."
Seifer took a wary step towards the barred door.
"Closer."
"Hyne, Quistis, if I come any closer I'll be.."
"Closer. I want to look at your eyes. " She curled her hands round the bars.
Seifer managed to look both puzzled and acutely embarrassed. "Huh?"
Quistis snapped "For Hyne's sake!", dropped the weapons and grabbed him by his coat collar, wrenching him closer to the bars with the decaying sheepskin lining clenched in her fists. It was slightly damp beneath her hands. She pulled his face down to minimise their difference in height, forcing him to bend his head awkwardly to the side so she could stare into his face.
His pupils were slightly dilated with shock, but his eyes were their familiar mocking green.
The fleece ripped off in her hands and Seifer jumped back as if she'd just bitten him, snapping "What the hell?" He scooped up the end of the cigarette from the floor where he'd dropped it as she grabbed him and took a deep drag, relaxing as the nicotine kicked in to something slightly less tense than a violin string.
"You aren't evil."
"Don't sound so surprised. Doesn't mean I'm nice." He sounded slightly insulted.
"I've got a bone to pick with you" Quistis stepped closer.
"Yeah? Get in line." Seifer looked slightly uncomfortable, or just more so, holding onto the cigarette like it was some kind of life preserver. He inhaled.
"Five years?"
"I was possessed. It didn't mean anything. And anyway. It's your fault. That skirt. All the class wanted to sleep with you." He sounded defensive , even with the whispering.
"And like you never tried that excuse before. 'I didn't do my homework, miss, cos I was possessed.'" She mimicked a whine and Seifer winced. She bent to pick her whip up and noticed that he wasn't even trying to stare down her top. In fact he seemed to be leaning away from her. "Seifer, that class was half women. "
He raised both hands defensively and spoke around the cigarette. "Like I said, the whole class. Bitchy. Go sharpen your teeth on someone else while you're not wasting the last three minutes of my sanity. "
"I knew fighting with a whip was a mistake. At least you just got a sword. You didn't have to sit through three years of bondage jokes."
"What happened after three years?"
"I got better. So they stopped. Can't imagine why. And have I told you yet that you are so stupid? I had so many reservations abut this whole thing the whole restaurant was packed out and then we just happen to get into this kind of mess?"
"Huh?"
"Guess not. You may think you can kick everything else's butt, but when it comes to mental defences you've got more holes than a colander. "
"Like we could have done anything else? Spur of the moment. And most things don't get up from a bullet in the head." Seifer spoke in the resentful way he had when he couldn't inflict damage.
"So you have to go pick a fight with the one thing that doesn't? I know they always say you can't get into Garden if you're a complete moron but in your case I really do wonder. We've got twenty other soldiers who, let's face it, have cannon fodder written all over them, but no, you have to go and do something damn stupid on your own without telling anybody."
"Hey, teamwork's great. Gives them someone else to shoot at."
"The thing that's really scary about that is you're probably serious" Quistis began to relax a little bit as they both dropped into their default mode of bickering.
'Scuse me, but I'm the one who's busy being possessed here… I didn't see you thinking up a plan, super-brain, so don't knock mine. If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."
"But it didn't work. That's why it's stupid. And I thought 'no teamwork' was your motto. The number of times I had to tell you there is no 'I' in team."
"No, my motto's 'Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last and don't ever volunteer to do anything.'"
"Well, you sure screwed that one up big time."
"I'm working on it. It'd make my life so much simpler. And longer." Seifer wondered how the hell he got into this situation.
.At this point in time the best thing that was going to happen to him was that some soldiers were going to lock him up forever. He'd probably racked up about four death sentences by now. They'd probably hire someone to use Phoenix Down on him just so they could make him more dead.
He sighed and thought he hadn't got time to think.
"Look, last time…" Getting brainwashed, he decided, was something that if it happened once was too much. " It was..like being drunk. Well, you wouldn't know, being teetotal." He said the last word with the kind of dark mistrustfulness that you usually associated with sentences like 'so..you like to stamp on small furry animals for fun?.'
"Like you know, you know what you're doing. It just made everything easier. Kind of mellow-dreamy. Even when I fed Rinoa to Adel or tortured Squall, hell, it seemed a good idea at the time."
"Like you'd never enjoy that normally.."
He grinned reluctantly. "Okay, but there's a whole lot of difference between wishing you could and you know, doing it. Such a fuckin' idiot."
"Who?" Quistis asked.
"Him." . He thought." Both of us. Me, ' cause I was pretty damn stupid, and him, cos the day I admit that guy isn't a complete twat it'll be a cold day in Hell."
"So how's this different?"
"This ..it's like I don't feel anything and I can't do anything about it. Like someone else's thoughts. Like my mind isn't fucking mine any more. Bastard." He said it awkwardly, like he was trying to explain it to himself as well.
Quistis was still standing at the bars, checking her watch and looking worried.
Seifer shrugged. "Forget it. You got any magic?"
She guessed what he was thinking. "No."
"Any other ways to..stop it?" The last word was dragged out. Seifer hated asking for help, though he usually had no problem demanding other things, like money.
"Well- you could wrap tinfoil round your head."
He paced. "This isn't the damn time for you to develop a sense of humour, Quistis." Two minutes till I lose my mind and you're not bloody helping."
"Well, technically, it's forty-seven seconds."
"Well, technically it can go fuck itself."
She thought. "Don't think so. Circle of salt, might, if we had some. Horseshoes, same Cold iron, well, you've got so much of that I'm surprised you can walk, so that's no good. I'm sorry."
"Not as sorry as me."
She hadn't got an answer to that.
"Hell, at least I beat the lung cancer." Seifer leant back against the wall again, and this time there was something tense about his face that made her realise that he was afraid, and that he hated it, hated the thing for making him feel it, and that probably the best thing she could do was ignore it in case she didn't want to be the target of sudden imminent violence. Seifer's usual response to not being able to do anything being to get mad and hit someone.
A fatal flaw. Fatal for the other person, anyway.
"See, this is why they should have sent Squall. He'd shoot me through the heart faster than he could say "And you're to blame." "
"He wouldn't have done that."
"No, he would have aimed for the head, 'cos he doesn't think I've got one." He scowled. "Anyway, I've got better things to do with my last twenty seconds than talk about that asshole." The cigarette was almost down to the filter. "Or you can shoot me now,, 'cause I'm not bloody sure I can do it myself." His anger seemed to have cooled to a dark hopelessness that was so entirely unlike Seifer it scared her more than his usual smirking tough-guy aggression. He flicked his last knife out of the sleeve of his jacket, gave it a long look and then threw it blindly in a long ragged arc along the corridor. It scored a deep white slash down on one of the walls and clattered to the floor. The echo went a long way.
"Can't do anything fuckin' right."
"Look, I'm sorry."
She looked up at him through the bars, over the glasses, and Seifer thought of all the times he'd idly fantasised her in rather similar scenarios that always seemed to end with her wearing very little clothing. Dream. Right. More like a nightmare.
He leaned closer to the bars, watching her as she glanced at her watch, saw the blinking numerals and caught her up a fierce one-armed hug, holding the cigarette out of the way before he stepped back and took a long deep drag. A kind of frayed rage seemed to simmer behind his eyes.
There was a thin greasy-slick feel to the air around them that spread out and felt like the calm at the centre of a storm, the eye of a tornado. The Galbadians slept on at Quistis' feet, oblivious and snoring, and although Rahel, the nearest, threw an arm over her head and mumbled something incoherent and foreign, they didn't wake.
It was silent in a kind of cold muzzy way, the tension drawn out near to breaking point.
And like battle, after the waiting, everything began to happen at once.
Quistis' watch beeped, marking the hour, and Seifer shivered and raised his hands to the side of his head, fingers spread wide as if to block a sound only he could hear. The cigarette butt dropped from his hands as the tension popped like a soap-bubble and the little sounds of the corridor came flooding back, together with the dripping of water and the slight smell of damp and rotting things.
Quistis drew back from the bars again, cautiously. They left little flakes of rust on her gloves like dried blood. She checked the whip at her belt, lying coiled like a sleeping snake, but knew that she wouldn't use it. Strange, as she could think of at least four occasions where she would have given practically anything for an excuse to kill, or at least slightly maim, Seifer Almasy -Hyne, the man could be annoying sometimes- but somehow it wasn't any fun when he was asking her to.
Plus, of course, logic dictated that shooting him wasn't actually going to kill the spirit, so therefore there was no point, as it'd just have to find another host, and guess who was the nearest?
She ticked off her options on gloved fingers but stopped when her hand curled into a fist. Sit tight, observe, and react. That was the logical thing to do right now. Logic, Quistis' main lifebelt in the sea of uncertainty and sloppy thinking.
She watched and waited.
Seifer looked up and gave a smug satisfied smile like the cat who got the cream, which would have erased all of Quistis' doubts if she hadn't already known the truth.
They held another brief showdown with their eyes. It was getting to the point where the glances across the corridor were more like high noon at the OK Corral.
Quistis broke the silence first. Her voice sounded tired and sharp, even to her own ears.
"So you're what? Just popping by to say hello?"
"Maybe I wanted to see you."
"No, you didn't. You wanted something. What?"
"Maybe he wanted to see you."
She wondered why the hell it thought she was so important and then , with a cold feeling in her belly, knew, If it had control of Seifer's body, maybe it could read his mind too. It had to. It was the only reason it would have come down here. She'd bet Seifer had been looking for her.
"Hyne, you've become a cynic," he said. "Where's all that charming optimism of yours, Quistis? You sound like me."
"Not like you. Like him." Great, she thought, and at the same time hated it for messing with his head, with hers. Seifer Almasy, the Cynicism Fairy.
"What are you, anyway?"
"That's two questions."
"So what?" The anger burned her like a cold flame. She remembered the old stories her adopted grandmother had told her, sitting on her lap by the old hearth with the smell of baking shortbread. Tales of fairy deals, bargains and standing stones at midnight. There had been darker stories, too, of hags and imps and bargains gone sour as spilt milk, only to be averted by clever words or cold iron, opened scissors and knives. The old woman had been wrong about that, as she'd been wrong about so many other things later. And Quistis had never had much time for fairy tales, even as a child. Even at that age, she'd never been so stupid as to believe in all those stories where good defeated evil and everybody got what was coming to them, be it a princess bride or a pair of red-hot dancing shoes. Unlike some she could name….
"Do you really want to know, girl?"
The voice wasn't Seifer's anymore, it had moved while they were talking to the shadows to the left of the corridor and although she strained her eyes-and she had good eyes-she saw nothing apart from a red glow that would have been the end of his cigarette, if she hadn't remembered he'd dropped it on the floor.
It reminded her of the eyes of the wolves.
Quistis shivered.
Her eyes fought to make something out of the shadows, focusing so hard fluorescent dots pinwheeled across her vision and blood swished through her ears. The red light went out.
"Seifer?" She hated to use his name, but realising that she really didn't have anything else to call it, 'hey, evil spirit of the creepy house that seems to be able to possess things' not really being an option.
Her voice echoed slightly in the gloom. There was a tiny sound from the corner that could have been a boot scraping against rock, and then the silence of nothing, which mercenaries very quickly learned to tell from the silence of someone being there and trying very hard to keep quiet.
Quistis' breath steamed in the cold air. She sighed and slumped back against the wall, feeling the cold of it against her back and then her ass as she slid down it to the floor. Excitement over. Nothing to do apart from sleep and worry. And didn't you just know it, the worry was stopping her from sleeping.
Shame. She glanced at the creased pages of the SeeD manual left forgotten on the floor and decided against reading it again. She knew it all off by heart anyway. If she had another book, or a baseball, or a journal.. Yeah. Diary entry number two hundred and forty four. Bumped into Seifer Almasy last night. He seemed a bit off colour. I think either he had flu or he'd been possessed by the spirit of the evil castle ghost. Each possibility is so exciting I'm officially thrilled. Locked in castle with no hope of escaping. Send help.
The smell of nicotine drifted up from the floor from the fag-end Seifer had dropped. She reached through the bars and picked it up in an oddly sentimental manner, looked at it for a minute and then threw it away as far as she could manage through the door. The scent still hung in the air, hiding the misty old-building smell of mould and water with a kind of musty acid sharpness that was all Seifer.
He'd smelled like that when he'd kissed her.
He'd kissed her.
In her head a part of her sat head in hands and mourned the loss of several million brain cells and a large chunk of professional conduct.
It wasn't even like it had been a particularly nice kiss, but that didn't stop her from wondering what he kissed like when he wasn't being possessed by an evil spirit,.
Maybe she was going mad. Quistis had long ago decided that she had a malformed slot in her brain for all that girly stuff.
At Garden, she'd always liked Squall better. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn't given her any trouble at all, compared to Seifer. During the last year it had seemed like she was having to bail Seifer out of something every day, ranging from all-too-frequent and bloody fights, which he always managed somehow to pass off as training rather than brawls, to the time when he'd pasted pictures of her face on a glamour model's body and circulated the clips round the garden's intranet, along with a strip poker game that allowed you to remove bits of clothing as the game progressed.
Maybe she should book herself a psychologist's appointment when she got back.
If she got back.
She should try to go to sleep. One of the first things they taught cadets in a situation like this, it was always a good idea to eat or sleep while you could, just so you were full and rested for when there was something they could do.
She shifted, accidentally knocking her boot against Rahel's outstretched hand. The older woman was lying rolled into a compact ball shape, knees tucked to her chest, but she rolled over at Quistis' touch, waking fast, like most SeeDs. Quistis was just thankful none of them had woken earlier. Now that would have been a nice mess to try to explain away…
The older woman's voice was still muzzy with sleep and her accent was more prominent. "You okay? You look..weird."
Quistis sighed. "Fine." She really wasn't, but she knew Rahel didn't want to hear all about her problems, and given her loyalties, it probably wouldn't be such a good idea to tell her just what had happened. She huddled into a tighter ball, arms hugging her knees. Yeah. Get out of this somehow, and then go back to Garden, earn money to go on another mission so she could be in another situation like this. Wow. What a life. Join the Garden, they'd said. See the world.
Rahel rolled over and seemed to go back to sleep. Quistis was grateful. She really didn't want to talk, especially to someone who she didn't know. The depression settled over her like a well-worn coat, inviting her to wallow in misery, but she pushed it aside and got up to try the door again. It still didn't open, but then she hadn't really expected it to. The unyielding metal was frozen cold under her hands and the silence lay tired and thick around her.
Her watch said six a.m., which meant the sun should be coming up in a couple of hours, but then down here it was always going to be dark, apart from the creepy dim lighting that seemed to come from nowhere. It wasn't a comforting thought that she'd probably forget whether the time on her watch was morning or evening, midnight or noon, if they stayed down here much longer. Should have sprung for a twenty-four hour one, she thought wryly. It seemed several centuries since she'd woken up in the cell and ice ages could have passed in the time since she'd last left Garden.
Ice. Hyne, it was cold. The warm spot she'd created for herself on the floor had evaporated as soon as she'd moved, shirt pulling out of trousers and air hissing down the tiny gaps between her face and fur hood. Ice was forming in tiny slow crystals
on the water running down the walls, but thankfully it seemed to drain to something else much deeper through cracks in the floor, otherwise they'd already be knee-deep and well on the way to becoming novelty ice-cubes.
Quistis bent and unrolled her sleeping bag from her pack, wrapping around her heedless of muddy boots. Wrapped round her it created a snug cocoon that wasn't entirely warm or seriously cold but something in-between, that at least had to be better than standing up and freezing. She settled down in it, hoping the warmth would send her to sleep, but either the coffee or the nerves seemed to have hot-wired her nervous system, sending it straight to red alert. No more sleep, at least not for a while.
When she lifted a hand to her head, slipping it between her hair and the hood for extra warmth, the strands fell between her fingers in sticky lank locks. A ridge of dried blood and scab ridged her scalp and the cropped ends of her trimmed hair bristled in her palm as she explored it gingerly. There was no heat, except what she would have expected, no swelling and almost no pain. He'd done a good job. A nasty little thought suggested that Seifer probably had practice caring for injuries in various bar fights and brawls. Or maybe he'd actually paid attention in the first-aid lectures, although she seemed to remember him arguing that only losers and people too stupid to get out of the way got hurt. She'd have liked to be a fly on the wall when the doctor was cleaning his face up at the end of his and Squall's 'training' duel, although Squall at least seemed more proud than anything else of the scars that decorated both men's faces. And Seifer would definitely be proud of Squall's. …
Men. Couldn't live with them, couldn't live without them.
And living in these kind of situations was never easy at the best of times. Carry on like this and she'd never get her instructor's badge back.
Quistis resolved to do better next time, if there was one. She also resolved to keep her resolutions, for a change.
She slept, at last.
Seifer fought.
It was like trying to be two people at the same time. Occasionally other thoughts and feelings that couldn't possibly be his flickered across his mind, mostly feeling of hungry contentment and pure, fierce joy at being alive and Seifer couldn't remember ever having been that happy, at least not recently, without the addition of mind-altering drugs. It was anticipating something, moving busily and greedily towards it, and at the same time he was sure that it wasn't a good thing, or at least not for him. It was hard to keep himself together. He was losing it, literally, figuratively and in every way that mattered.
It was like being caught in a river, trying desperately to hold onto his personality even as the water fought to carry it away. Cold. Frightening. Almost impossible. Seifer hadn't ever been in a situation like this before. He guessed not a lot of people had, or at least not for very long. He'd probably been nearer than most, though, like Rinoa.
Not something to be proud of.
Soon he'd give up, let the fragments of his psyche trickle away. Dammit. He'd never been any good at this kind of mental shit anyway. Wasn't it Quistis who'd said he hadn't got any self-discipline?
It was very hard to think.
Other memories of the thing kept intruding, an uninvited guest crashing the party. They were mostly cold and dark, with lots of trees, Occasionally ghostly fragments of faces would flicker for a second, and then be washed away. All were blurred except one, a face that looked like some kind of statue, female and oval. It seemed to glow, and at the same time there was a feeling of a kind of peace, deceptively reassuring, and inviting as a cliff edge to a depressive.
At first he'd tried sorting through the memories, but as soon as he'd stopped focusing on one image it would slide through his brain like mercury and try as he might he couldn't hold more than one image for more than a few seconds. It was kind of like subliminal advertising, but instead of making him want to go out and buy hotdogs or something, he was starting to have ambivalent feelings about strange sparkly women.
Maybe this was what it was like being brain-damaged. Maybe he'd be one of those poor old sods who spent the last years of their life in a wheelchair, dribbling and staring and needing people to help them to the toilet. Urgh.
Seifer found it ironic that he'd criticised GFs so damn much. All that trying to save memories that he hadn't liked that much anyway just to be sure he could always trust himself and now his entire life was being unravelled like a ball of string.
He tried to focus.
The sudden explosion of light was a huge relief. Seeing out of his own eyes was like trying to look through a goldfish bowl-it was there, but all slightly distorted, and he couldn't get to it no matter how hard he tried. But it was light.
Clear glass words in his head like cut crystal. Still there?
And a fresh rush of shapes pictures images all crashed into his head, as he drowned in memories that lost focus as soon as they slipped away and which, like dreams, all seemed terribly important at the time
..trees.
………tantalising headrushtwistingfightingwaterand the feel of rain on his face or blood or tears.
A single captured image of a drop of water falling into a pool. It made a sound like the breaking of a mouse's heart. andeverythingrushingpastsofastfloatingdrowningandwhythehellwon'titstopmakeitstop
The head again.
He focused on it, forcing himself to make sense of it, dammit.
There must be something here that he could use as a weapon.
…..treesinthedarkofthenightbloodonthesnow
…blood on the pavement.
A stone. People bowed.
..boughs, branches over the moon
And with a force that almost knocked him back and scattered his thoughts once and for all, the outline of a carved face.
He held onto it like grim death, like an anchor in the rushing sea of memories that weren't his own. This time the image stuck in his mind and the crushing pressure of the spirit on his thoughts loosened, just a little.
The world swam and came back into focus. It was like trying to fight for a view in a crowd, the same sense of pressure and crowding, metaphorical elbows in the face. He hung on.
Better, but still not good.
Seifer felt muscles twist and flex as the thing walked up stairs, saw high stone walls pass as in a dream and heard the trickling of water with his own ears. At least they felt like his, but in an oddly dissociated way, and it was like all the synapses weren't connecting, like being paralysed. He had no control, no power, and if there was one thing he hated more than not being able to hit anything, it was being powerless. Weak. Defenceless.
Everyone knew that if you weren't a hunter, then you were a victim. And Seifer had made up his mind very early not to be a victim.
This situation had now changed.
He watched dumbly from his own eyes as the thing wearing his body like a favourite coat walked up a flight of stairs, turned right, and then as the room spread out into a large hall.
It looked familiar and after a few seconds of silent watching (stay still, dammit) he decided it was the entrance hall, again. He mentally gave himself a good kick in the ass for not finding Quistis earlier. It had to be some kind of magic, or okay, maybe just a map. He'd walked miles, Seifer thought, and took a second's evil pleasure in the thought that the spirit was getting his blisters.
The thing walked across the room, confident, like it knew where it was going, to a spot just to the right of the main door. It was still dark outside, the velvety kind of dark that came from light reflecting off fallen snow, eerily luminescent.
Seifer watched his own hand reach out and his other hand pull the glove off.
His right hand was then laid flat on a slight depression in the stone at chest height. He could feel the cold stone against his palm. There was a moment of building pressure. He studied the lines on the back of his hand with detached photographic intensity, pale tan crisscrossed with scars and healing grazes, blunt bitten nails.
The pressure released.
It felt like casting magic back at Garden, or mostly the same, the same focus and intensity of the magic pouring out of him, except in reverse. If it had felt, earlier, like he was being swept away by a torrent, then this was springwater in the desert, but he knew that it wouldn't be long until the magic rejuvenated the spirit enough to notice him again, and then it would crush him with the force of water pouring from a dam.
He felt the spirit's relief as the flow of magic nourished it too, fat contentment, then a thread of uncertainty and he knew it searched for him. The probing lens of his thoughts sought him like a magnifying glass, pinning him, leaving him open to scrutiny.
Nowhere to hide.
Little puppet, dance for me.
The words cut like scissors.
Go to her. Bring her to me. Do I need to explain?
He screamed as the full force of the spirit's power crashed into him like a hurricane, colliding with his own memories of Rinoa, her weight on his arm as he dragged her to Adel's tomb, blade at her throat. She'd screamed. too.
"Seifer! Stop it! Haven't you done enough!? I know you're not like that!"
and he thought wryly, you never really knew me at all, did you, but he couldn't remember thinking that at the time, it had been all dreams and hazy sweet certainty and Edea/Ultimecia, the bitterness of defeat and betrayal and revenge like acid in his throat. The chunks of memories he recalled slotted together like some kind of awful jigsaw, his own personal disaster, a million pieces and still no glue to hold it all together.
He heard his own voice. "Can't go back now! I can't go anywhere! The sorceresses as one! That is Ultimecia's WISH!" and thought wearily how he sounded so fucking young, and suddenly it wasn't Rinoa in his arms, in his dream, black silky hair sleek in front of him, all blue dress and idealism, it was Quistis.
She stared at him like he'd betrayed her
(but then of course he has and it all feels so damn natural, it all keeps on flooding back)
bring her
and opened her mouth and he knew what she was going to say, knew exactly, because she'd already said it and then he remembered that it wasn't her,
(but it is)
Her
that that was then and this was now and his mind felt like it was shattering into pieces, his whole world crashing down… again.
"......Seifer. No more...Please?"
(as if that's going to stop anything)
NEED
and he opened his mouth to say "Rinoa...",
(Quistis….)
hearing, remembering, because he was having to remind himself it wasn't really there not really there but it is
(was)
and he couldn't stop it, just the same thing, over and over.
"Seifer!!! NO!"
and the cry echoed through every fibre and bone in his body…….
"..not againIwon'tIwon'tyoucan'tmakemejustfuckingtry."
And he realised he was shouting.
Lalala. Romantic tension finally……hehehe.
Many thanks to all who reviewed. It makes me happy. Oh yeah, my sister commented about all of my reviews-most people reading this are not in prisons or asylums, are you? I mean, it's okay if you are. Family-the best way to undermine your confidence…
And a small gift from my sister. GB, the PG version:
Chapter one:
Seifer: (censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,)
(censored)
(censored)
Quistis: (censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,
censored, censored, censored, censored, censored,)
and so on…..
I think she thinks I swear too much. Or something.
Anyway…
Breaker-one, (ta! Re the characterisation thing-I think you can do Seifer two ways, One, he can be Squall's antagonist, but then he has to lose, eventually, so Squall can win. And if you lose too much you just look lame. Or then you can jump on the mind-control bandwagon and do the Seifer-redemption thing, which is much more interesting. ) caroline, (always forever) CelesteSpring (twice! Bows thankyou! I hope you like this one as much.) dust traveller (everyone go read Shards of Chaos, which rocks muchly) elfGurl306, (Thanks. J I try to update every two weeks, at the weekend) Imuthis, (..the cliffhangers…I don't plan it like that, it just seems the obvious place to stop.) and seventh ( why thankyou! Most people think my music taste is strange. But I LIKE it *grins*)
Next chapter-lots of action. Hope everyone understood this one*crosses fingers*