A/N: Again, thank you for reviews.
She didn't know how long she had been there, watching secretly how the soldiers went on their ways and finished their tasks given to them by their commander. Her steps were steady and slow and she had lost her sense of time when being outside here, her first day away from the haunting castle's capturing atmosphere.
Her eyes wandered through the bypassing soldiers' expressions, trying desperately to memorize each one of them into her mind but failed in doing so when realizing that she couldn't even began to read them. The faces were everywhere, making her conscious about the fact that the battle was now over and that the night had fell over their battlefield. But for how long would this fragile peace be unbroken? For how long could they have a break from their endless battles? She didn't know the answers.
How long had these soldiers already fought? How long could they go on fighting before they would be totally broken?
These were questions that got repeated over and over again, like lost ghosts haunting her mind while her unconscious sleep.
The night was almost sparkling. It was a dreamless ocean hanging over their lost figures, and when Quistis was gazing up to those stars while her stroll, she wondered when all that water would fall down onto their shoulders. The eyes of the sky, thousands of them blinking, almost like wondering those same questions, gazed back to her inquiring gaze and sealed her mind away from any answer.
Her steps lead her safely in front of the tent that had its peak on highest when compared to the smaller tents nearby it. It stood alone, slightly away from the others, but it stood by with pride, and funny enough it reminded her from the person who was the owner of that tent. He was arrogant, he loved the attention, but hated to accept any help at all. He was the commander and he thought that was enough. But Quistis knew that it wasn't enough if you wanted to be a great leader.
Before, she would've thought Seifer to be perfect for pointing the way, but after seeing Squall she had immediately realized that it isn't enough if you are strong and stubborn to the end. Great leader must also be wise and careful. She was sure that Seifer wasn't lacking on those qualities, but that he just hadn't gotten a change to use them yet.
She drew the leather canvas away from the doorway and her eyes were met with a soft light coming from the torch that hanged down from the roof. The smell that gently slipped into her nostrils was a pleasant one. It was some kind of a mix between the mild smell of leather canvas and a vague fragrance of flowers, but there were no sign of flowers anywhere in the tent.
She saw the carefully piled up maps of the area on one of the three wooden chairs, and the only but still quite a good-looking and sturdy table made of oak wasn't unnoticed either. Overall, the neat interior didn't surprise her at all. No matter how little the time of having the 'joy' of knowing him had been, she knew that Seifer wasn't a pig when it came to keeping care of his own space, and that he was even somehow obsessed to look great, no matter how many wars were going on.
Her thoughts became all but steady when the man in question turned to glance the intruder of his peace. He only watched her once, glaring her with the same glare than he had only few hours back. His eyes held anger, but it was more subtle than before, the threats were also gone and she could see the change in them even when it was only a slight one. After few seconds, he turned to watch himself from the mirror again, continuing to wipe the blood away from his forehead.
She let the leather door slide away from her hand back to its place over the tent's doorway. Seifer kept on wiping his face with the white towel, ignoring the woman who had come to this tent for the first time ever. He turned the towel over, changing the blood stained spot to a cleaner one and then moved it back against his forehead, the smell of the clean towel being refreshing, almost unusually luxurious. But the feeling of luxury failed when the reek of his own blood sneaked to his nose, bringing back the heavy headache that had just moment ago left him at peace.
"Are you feeling alright?" She stepped behind him and watched his blond head, silently thinking that he needed a shower. His golden hair was messy and it slightly smelled with the mix of blood and sweat. Not such a great odor.
He watched the woman figure now getting reflected next to his form on the mirror and he thought that the picture looked ridiculous. It was almost like an abstract painting, there was too little space for both of them. The two of them in a same picture was too odd. He didn't answer to her, not even with an empty glance, he just watched the mirror and laughed inside himself. He brought the towel back up to his forehead and started to scrape away the last of the dried up blood.
She sighed, bringing her eyes to the mirror when she waited for him to talk. She was also captured to look at the picture that the mirror reflected, but she ignored the tall man standing next to her and just looked her own reflection. Only now she remembered that she didn't know what she herself looked like, as she had never seen her own reflection before. She noticed herself to be quite attractive, not as ugly as she had thought herself to be. Her slightly pouty lips were soft and the line of her jaw was neither too round or too sharp. It was a low curve, but it held her face up proudly. Her hair color was somewhere between blonde and brunette, not so exceptional colored, but still smooth and neatly gathered up to a loose knot to the back of her head. She was sure that this female, whom she had now met for the very first time, could have looked much better without the tired skin under her eyes and the face that never smiled or laughed.
Quistis looked into her own eyes, first with a passing gaze, but then looking sharply at them, focusing into reading the depths of those blue eyes. She wandered through those layers that she saw from the depths, and she saw that the darker blue around her pupils made her gaze more deep, somehow mysterious when she tried to see inside to her own mind and soul. Eyes are the mirror to the human soul, but she saw nothing from those eyes. The woman on this mirror had no past, no future, and no own opinions… She was nothing. And Quistis felt like the woman before her wasn't her, but somebody else. But she soon realized that she only hoped that this was somebody else.
Oh, how easy things would be then…
She removed her eyes to Seifer's mirrored picture that was still cleaning his own face. He had still said nothing. And she knew that the silent treatment that he was putting up to her was because of the things that had happened before the night had fell down. Seifer was trying to punish her from stopping the battle between him and Squall. She knew that Seifer was angry about it but Quistis also knew that he wouldn't be able to keep it on much longer. Seifer just always needed to open up his mouth so that he could say something arrogant.
It was almost like one of the laws of nature and she felt a little relieved to know that even when she was so lost in this world, she could always read Seifer, she always knew what he had on his mind. Everything always seemed to slip through her fingers before she knew what they meant, but Seifer stayed without any bigger question marks. Seifer was there. He was the most stable thing, beside her books of course, and it made her feel strange. To have that kind of a relationship between them even when they were practically enemies… Their point of views diverged from each other so much, but somehow it was always forgotten in the way.
"How long are you going to stay quiet?" He dropped the towel down from his hands to the table when hearing the question that wasn't really a question neither a sentence that needed to be acknowledged. He didn't glance at her, but he knew that her gaze was laid right on the middle of the reflection of his green eyes. He brushed his finger carefully through the cut over the bridge of his nose and when he thought that he couldn't feel his hand over the skin, he thought that the cut had become numb and so he pressed his fingers right down to it, like a child that couldn't stop poking a wound that was still healing up.
And then he noticed that it was anything but numb. "Ouch, dammit!" His hand flew away like he had just touched something that burned, and the ache flew over from his cut inside to his head. The painful waves went through his whole body from his head down to his toes, and then it jumped back, forcing even his eyes to close up from the impact.
She didn't smile, not even when part of her had enjoyed the outburst of pain, which she knew to be rare coming from this man. She took the closest wooden chair from under the table and turned the chair around so that its back was towards to the revealing mirror. Then she guided him by his arm to sit down to the wooden chair and he didn't try to stop her from doing so.
"Let me look at it." She moved his hand away from hiding the cut and met his silent stare that was revealed from under that same strong hand. She refused to look back at him and just moved her attention to the cut. It was a thin red line and it seemed to be a really neat wound. Most of the bleeding had stopped and the wound had already started to heal. He looked her eyes with careful obscurity and tried to make up his mind. He was angry to her, yes, but he was feeling that the will to revenge her somehow was fading away slowly, somewhere to the place in his mind where he usually stocked his not so good ideas so that he could erase them or bring them out again.
She moved the red kit, which she had brought with her, to the table by their side, and he watched her hand with a little smile tucked to the corner of his lips and eyes. She had brought her own bandage kit along even when he hadn't asked her to. He felt amused, but in the corner of his mind it began to change into some level of affection towards this woman who had now showed her new caring face to him. Soon, his smile formed a quiver of laughter, a shadow of a more heartfelt laugh, and it froze her hands for a second.
"What is it now?" She continued to open the kit and started to look it through while waiting for his answer. His laugh hadn't sounded as mean as it usually did, but it still made her feel cornered, like she had done something wrong, something that needed to be judged by him.
"Is this the only reason why you came here? To make sure that I'm alright?" He watched her eyes, wanting her to look back at him but knowing that she wouldn't do that. "Really, Quistis, I'm touched…" He moved his hand over to his chest, somewhere close to the place where his heart was beating, and he bowed to her slightly, with an exaggeratedly courteous tone on his husky voice. Her eyes flew over to him, now truly feeling cornered and also embarrassed. His eyes held the sparkle of laughter and when it slowly slipped down to his lips, his whole face was filled with amusement. And she was mortified by that look. She hadn't felt that there was something odd about her bringing this kit, but now she understood it. She had made herself a joke…
She carefully glanced the mirror behind Seifer's back, and watched her mirrored picture to make sure that she wasn't blushing. And she wasn't. When she could lean to this knowledge for support, she felt a little better and moved her focus back to the cut over Seifer's forehead. Slowly his laughter went away, but he still held the little sparkle on the corner of his eyes when watching her carefully again. She was cleaning the wound with a soft piece of cotton that she had carefully pulled away from the bigger set of cotton, and the cleansing liquid that she had dropped few drops to the cotton, had left a hint of a sterile smell to the silent air.
Her hands moved slowly, tracing the cotton piece against the wound, her fingers being careful not to give him any pain. She was gentle, slowly starting to slide the little piece of cotton over the red wound, and he just couldn't avoid himself from admiring those smooth hands and the woman who was so concentrated into her mission that she hadn't seen his lapse of thoughts. They just captured him, making him follow everyone of the movement of those hands with a careful eye, not wanting to break that image with any unneeded noise. But he made himself to stop it. There was no good reason to be watching her like this anyway.
"How is it like?" His question flew softly to the air even without him noticing it forming on to his lips.
"What?" The surface of the piece of the cotton had become red from all the cleaned up blood, and she changed it to a new one, putting the new white cotton ball between her fingers, slowly twisting it and moisturizing it with the cleansing liquid, before continuing to clean his wound with it.
"You know… Not being able to remember your past…" He swallowed his last words softly, trying to see how his question had affected her. She stopped with her work and her eyes got absorbed somewhere far away. Her eyes were targeted right down to him and for a while Seifer thought that she was looking at him, but then he soon understood that she actually didn't even see him anymore.
"It's… troubling… A part of me is missing and I feel myself hollow, somehow empty… Sometimes I do things that I don't even know myself doing…" Then she understood where she was and she continued to place the cotton over to his forehead. He saw that she now focused into the cleansing, but he could see that part of her was still missing.
"On the time of the last sunset, when I stopped you and Squall from fighting… It was like… like somebody else did that. It wasn't me… It was some kind of instinct that I don't remember existing. Many things that I do are based on those same vague instincts…"
His eyes dropped down, trying to think how it's like. Not to know why you do something that you do. Not to remember who you are or where you belong… Somehow, he could identify himself with that thought, and it wasn't hard either. But then the words hit him again. On the time of the last sunset… He was still feeling a little angry to her about the thing that she had pulled through then.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm fleeing from my past. That I don't want to remember something and therefore I decided to forget everything…" Quistis pulled her hand away from him. She put the last piece of cotton away, started to gather her things up to the kit, not noticing his figure that grew absentminded.
Her words rang in his mind and he soon forgot his final hint of anger. His eyes flee away from her onto the wall behind her shoulders and his gaze was motionless, oozing with thoughts that roamed through his mind, repeating everyone of her words, especially the word past...
"There are many ways to flee your past… Forgetting is only one of them…"
They were absent words, thoughts that only in accident wandered onto her arms, slipping into her ears that now listened to him.
She looked his eyes, this time with more interest than before, when she saw the change in them. Those eyes were now absent green, so open and calm, filled with secrets, hopes and dreams, failures and nightmares. Green ocean opened up before her and she felt that she could swim in those eyes just by looking at them… But no matter how open they were, she couldn't get a touch from them. She failed to read him, she could only look him over but she couldn't get a grip from his inner thoughts.
But one thing she could see. There was regret in those eyes. Regret that locked her up into his green eyes. And when she moved her eyes away from him, she could feel that part of her had stayed there into those eyes, trying desperately to understand him.
She closed the kit up and sighed softly, letting the words finally roll out of her mouth. It was better to move on again, because sometimes thoughts may just end up eating you. "It will probably leave a scar." Her voice dragged him away from his thoughts back to this tent and he pulled his composure together with only one snort accompanied with a wicked smile across his lips. "And perhaps you're a nurse…"
"It will most certainly leave a scar, Squall." The woman in front of him was somewhere in her mid forty and had a slightly plump figure. Her dark brown hair was highlighted with some slightly gray hairs, and her face was twinkling with a smooth smile and some little wrinkles across her face, most of them born from laughter.
She pushed herself away from her important patient, the rolls under her chair whining softly because of her weight, when she leaned to her working table, dropping one of the dirty cottons down to her trashcan. She turned back to him and saw him getting up from the examination chair and she saw that he wasn't really glad about the idea of having an eternal memento from his rival. Her eyeglasses dropped slightly from her eyes down against the bridge of her pointy nose, when she carefully asked the question that she had wanted to ask from the very first second, ever since she had heard the news about the duel between the two commanders.
"How is he?"
Squall leaned his head to his hand, hoping that the headache pill would soon do its job. He didn't need to ask Kadowaki whom she had meant with the question. It was obvious that Kadowaki wanted to know how Seifer was doing as she still somehow thought about him as one of them, as one of the SeeDs.
"Well enough to add a scar to me, it appears…" His reply was simple, with a hint of sarcasm, with the knowledge that he hated to have a scar made by Seifer. The only thing that gave him some comfort was the fact that Seifer had a same kind of memento. Memento of failing, made by Squall himself.
The little whispered laughter coming from the doctor on his left, told Squall that she was satisfied with the answer and that she wouldn't dig any deeper into the matter. He wasn't feeling up for answering, he just wanted to forget this and relax for a while before the war would go on again. But his mind soon forgot his will.
The picture of the girl came up again. Still she cried, still her eyes were stabbing him, her tears drowning him. And he didn't know how to stop them… The memory was again fresh and he felt wounded because of it. He had only survived this far, by forgetting that memory and now it had been brought up again, reminding him from his cowardliness all those years ago. She was so familiar, so alike with the little girl in his mind.
Trepe… Hadn't Seifer called her Trepe? Yes, he was now sure that he had said it…
The picture of the woman running up to the hill jumped out to his eyes, making him shiver. The resemblance was breathtaking, but Squall couldn't believe it to be true… He just couldn't make himself believe it, because it sounded so unbelievable, so stupid to say aloud to anyone else but to himself.
No, it was better to forget it… It wouldn't do good to just think about this. Why should you think even when you know that it won't help anything… This was his rule that he always wanted to follow. He hated to think about things that you couldn't change. He hated to have regrets, to think about something that you've done and hope that it would've been different. But then he understood that he had done that just few seconds ago. He held regrets, which for the first time in these five years of his life had been brought up from the corner of his mind where he had buried that memory away, hidden it carefully so that no one could see it.
Regrets became renewed in his mind when he breathed and made himself promise not to talk about this with anyone. Now the regrets were raw, making him stumble away from his rules and from the sturdy frames surrounding his person, but he decided that he would go on… Even with these memories.
The door opened after a silent knock that was heard without him realizing it, and a steel looking woman, a little older than Squall himself, but still as serious, hardened from the battles and deaths, came to the room and gave her news. The SeeDs had been able to locate Ellone as planned.
She indeed was being held captive in the Revengeful Knights' base.