A/N: Sorceresses live longer than humans; I thought when I was on the train once. I can't remember for the life of me if this has basis in the canon because it's been a while since I played the game, but I can remember furiously scribbling this idea down in my notebook when I should have been studying for some exam. Rinoa wouldn't leave my brain alone until I'd written this. This fic really makes me want to delve into some more exploration ... but I'm satisfied with where it ended, so I don't think I will.
***
Rinoa remembered how it was originally, but never could conjure in her mind a picture of how it should have been.
She remembered: there was barely a sliver of light in the hall and it danced amongst the congregating people around her that made it very difficult to see, and even more so to move. Simulated and subdued, the orange glow crawled through the whirlpooling bodies, and Rinoa moved with it, searching and turning in a world that only had the strength to hold herself. She found a young girl dressed in white silk and Rinoa stared at her, watching her eyes scan the room until, inevitably, they fell upon herself, merely flickering over the place she stood yet still piercing straight through. The girl didn't know Rinoa existed, no one in that scene she was tired of seeing ever did.
The seconds flew by as quickly as the steps of the dance. Rinoa recalled the girl's enthusiasm: the girl's connection and interest in the world around her was almost palpable. The girl was the only person who was not a SeeD or invited by one, so her fascination with the foreign world was tangible, like electric needles in the air, testing and searching.
Rinoa counted down from six. Exactly on her zero the girl's eyes flicked to the left side of the room. Squall Leonhart. Rinoa remembered the name and almost every nuance of the man himself, and the girl too remembered him, but only by name, and only through the drunken ramblings of a man determined to convince everyone in a Galbadian bar that Squall had invented his second name himself, to hell with the consequences. Her dress twirled around her as she stalked towards the man, and he looked up wondering why anyone was approaching him at all.
Every time she places herself once again in this scene, Rinoa always remembers her first thought about Squall when she sees herself -- wearing the only short dress she ever owned -- frown under the crystalline glass canopy. She always wondered whom his eyes were trained upon that night, darkly brooding and blue and expressive of so much that she'd never come to understand.
Repeating the scene didn't explain anything to Rinoa. She made herself stand beside him, always looking in the same direction as he and never witnessing what it was that haunted his countenance. There was only the black hallway in front of his eyes, but it wasn't the corridor that darkened them.
It was something that existed only in Squall's mind. But Squall was dead.
