"And this is the truth of the ultimate Destruction," the Revenant had explained. "All your smiles and your tears of joy, all your weeping and your grey lamentations, they are to the world as the clouds and the winds that may pass and even alter but will never remain. What is the great stock-mark of humanity? What sets it so above and apart? Even the lords of the sea have no control over when the oceans freeze or boil; they are with the fish, their lords and the shepherds of their doom."

It is said that the truth of calamity is too great to be understood: as a pebble on a meteor would not know if the meteor plummeted, so we do not know if we are part of one great slide toward an ultimate ending. We sense only small changes and are overwhelmed by the great; in this manner, the disaster we foresee is not so terrifying as the one we cannot.

I fall the portents, all the dreams, all the whispers of encroaching doom are real, then perhaps there is hope in the future after all....

-

Seifer woke up to a note slipped carefully under his door.

For a few moments, he was honestly unsure of whether or not to pick it up. It wasn't exactly a big secret as to where he was living--but it wasn't exactly common knowledge, and he didn't know who would go to the trouble of finding him just to slip a folded half-sheet of paper to him.

Eventually, after convincing himself it would blow up in his hand, he walked over and snatched it up. Unfolding it, he read what was printed neatly inside.

You'll come with me to the Tear's Point.

...unsigned.

It didn't matter. He recognized the handwriting--it was the same neat script that he had received on countless assignments, usually saying things like do over. ...there was really no reason for Quistis to be leaving cryptic messages at his apartment--not that he could see, at least.

With an utterly inward groan, he pulled on his trenchcoat and headed for the Palace. Even if he had no interest whatsoever in going out on some harebrained escapade, he could at least see what was going on.

-


Rinoa was gone.

Squall might have panicked, if he was anything like the type to panic. Instead, he had alerted the necessary Palace officials and begun a methodical search on his own, half of his mind complaining at him that there were more important things to be doing and the other half very, very worried that somehow the voices had returned and weren't as benign, this time.

It took him an hour to cover the palace and its grounds--the grounds she might realistically gain entrance to, in any case. It took him another half-hour to go through the next logical procedures, and a bit longer to find someone who suggested he check the Ragnarok.

The Ragnarok was silent and empty--no one was using it at the moment, so it just sat at the Esthar Airstation like a particularly large, particularly impressive statue. The guards at the gate let him pass as a matter of course, and without any trouble he made it into the massive Hangar.

Darkness descended on him, as someone clapped both hands over his eyes from behind. He froze instead of striking back--there was a light giggle, and a whiff of a familiar scent.

"Guess who?"

Aggravation was beginning to win over concern, but he pushed it away in favor of relief. "Rinoa?"

She laughed, releasing him--and then spinning him around, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him squarely on the jaw. He was bewildered--and she must have noticed it, because she smiled and stared directly into his eyes. "Everyone's so worried," she said by way of explanation. "The world's not ending, Squall. You think I would let that happen?"

Squall smiled back and relaxed--marginally. Rinoa was trying to lighten his day. He shouldn't be surprised about this any more--not after three months. "We don't know what's happening," he chided, and then nearly felt bad for correcting her.

"But it's not going to be anything terrible. It's not going to be anything we can't handle."

Squall hesitated, and Rinoa pulled back. She could see that he was formulating a response in his mind--Prepare for the worst, the eternal caveat in all of Squall's reasonings. She adopted a mock-frown, dropping her hands to absently fix some quirk of his furred collar.

"But I could be wrong," she said, imitating solemnity. "Who knows? Maybe Ultimecia's come back and is possessing Ultima Weapon's ghost and will take up Odine as her knight and just collapse reality like a cake when you slam the oven, and we won't have any chance to fight back before we all go 'poof.' But if that's the case, then worrying about it won't help, either!"

Squall didn't find anything amusing, as he was wont not to do. "We have to make sure we're prepared for whatever happens," he said.

"Squall...." Rinoa frowned, looking directly at him and shaking her head slightly. "I don't think anything bad is happening. Odine doesn't think anything bad is happening. Are you sure you're not just seeing problems where there aren't any?"

Squall thought on that for a moment. Something wasn't ringing true about the situation as it stood--but he couldn't put his finger on it, not yet. But he wasn't willing to push all caution out of his mind--there was something, and somehow he knew that, but he couldn't articulate it at all.

"You were worried about that voice," he began--

Rinoa glanced away. "It was just a bad dream," she said. "That's understandable, isn't it? Everyone was so worried about all the weird things going on in the Crystal Pillar and at Tears Point that I had a nightmare. I didn't mean to worry you so much."

He was worried, and though Rinoa wasn't the greatest of his concerns, she certainly wasn't the least of them, either.

But it was fairly obvious that she wouldn't put up with his caution--not now, anyway, and not if she knew about it. And, even with years of inertia and days of concerns stacked up behind him, Squall was finding it harder and harder to see the worst in things.

Sometimes, these things were just impossible to resist.

-

It wasn't hard for Seifer to find Quistis. The Palace guards knew her and directed him to where she most likely was at this time of day--the Esthar Tea Room, one of a dozen similar anterooms sometimes used as casual lounges. And, true to prediction, there she was--reading a newspaper and sipping pale Estharan tea and looking terribly proper.

Seifer walked directly up to her table, dropped the note down in front of her, and--without preamble--demanded "Are you asking me out on a date, Instructor?"

Evidently he hadn't sounded quite as sarcastic as he'd mean to, because Quistis glanced up--obviously taken aback--and stared at him for a moment. "Excuse me?"

"What's with the note?" Seifer translated.

Quistis stared at him for a moment, longer, then picked the paper up and looked at it. "...I don't understand," she said.

(What a coincidence. Neither do I.) "You wrote it, didn't you?"

"No." Quistis set it down, along with her tea. "I'll admit it looks like my handwriting, but I never wrote this."

Seifer digested that for a moment. "And you never left it at my apartment either, is that right?"

Quistis looked levelly at him. "Seifer, I don't know where you live."

Seifer mulled over that for a good two seconds.

"Then what the hell is going on with that?"

Quistis shook her head, frowning at the offending document. "Seifer, have you given out any information, of any sort, about what's going on here? To anybody?"

Seifer couldn't believe he was being asked that. "Why, yes, Instructor," he snapped back. "I've been talking about it with all my buddies when we meet for lunch down at the pub. What kind of a stupid ques--"

"How many people know who you are and where you live?"

Seifer balked. "Why the hell do you need to know?"

Quistis gestured to the paper--not amused at all. "Has it occurred to you that you might be being threatened?" she asked.

It hadn't.

He spent a few seconds wondering how best to express his incredulity at that, but Quistis didn't give him the chance to. "Look at the writing," she said. "An unsigned note, left--it take it?--at your apartment, with rather commanding language. 'You will come with me.' And Tears Point isn't the most... benign of places--it has a lot of symbolism behind it, and--"

"And if you think that someone's planning to abduct me, drive a few hours into the Plains and kill me or something, I think you need to have your brain examined," Seifer shot back.

"I doubt you've been able to make enough friends in the last three months to offset all the enemies you made in the five weeks prior," Quistis pointed out cooly. "It's not impossible that someone would still want to threaten you. Maybe--"

(Here is comes,) Seifer thought.

"--you should give some thought to coming back to Garden."

"How many times do I have to refuse before you'll get that I don't want to?" Seifer demanded.

"At the very least," Quistis conceded, "you should report this to the police."

"And tell them what? 'Hello, someone left me an invitation at my door, could you arrest everyone with nice handwriting please?'" Seifer shook his head. "Forget it. You don't know anything about it, then whatever. Not like it's a big problem."

Quistis took a breath to object--

"So sorry for wasting your time," Seifer said, before she had a chance to. "Have a nice day, Instructor."

...and he hurried out the door.

Quistis picked up the note, glancing over it. It was unsettling--one more bit of a puzzle that was getting more complicated by the day.

She was sure--she was absolutely certain--that she hadn't written it. So why did it look so familiar...?