Quistis stormed into the Intelligence room with Selphie and Xu close behind. Xu immediately sat down at a computer and started working, deciphering the transmissions for herself. As SeeD's top cryptanalyst, if someone had made a mistake, she'd find it.
"Tell me this isn't going on," Quistis said.
"It is," Xu confirmed. "I just went over the transmission. What you see is live footage, broadcast from Balamb Garden. Seifer went and opened the feed."
Quistis scowled.
"I keep waiting for him to step into the camera," Eva said, "but-"
"He won't," Quistis interrupted. "He's too good for that. All we can do is wait until he decides to show his face."
"I wonder if Zell knows?" Selphie mused.
A fire blazed in Quistis's eye.
"Get him," she ordered, looking at Eva. "Now."
* *
He feels he could crush them all at once, but she restrains him with her words.
"Almasy is in the building. He'll go to the detention center and, if I'm not mistaken, emerge at the main concourse, which is where you'll seize him."
He nods. Something whirs as he does so, the humming of motors.
* *
The door slid open as Eva entered. Zell followed her, detached somehow, at once present and absent from the proceedings. He seemed unconcerned, disinterested at the forcible summons in the middle of the night, and Quistis knew, in that instant, that his thoughts rested elsewhere. Balamb Garden.
He shrugged. "Let's have it."
Quistis gestured to the monitors, but Zell didn't bother to look. He held her gaze and she saw in his eyes a mixture of Squall's dispassion and Seifer's disdain. She could yell at him, shout at him, strip him of his rank, threaten court martial. None of it would matter. Nothing in this room mattered to him, except in the most abstract sense.
She handed him the message. He glanced at it for the instant it took to see Seifer's number at the end, then looked back to her.
"You did this." Statement, not question.
"You know better than that," he replied. She'd never heard Zell's voice so cold.
"You knew."
"Of course."
"And you didn't-" Selphie blurted.
He stared. "Didn't what? Try to stop him?"
She nodded.
"Could you have stopped him?" He turned to Eva. "Could you?" His eyes swung back to Quistis. "You might have, but you would have had to kill him."
"You should have told someone," Xu said.
"What would you have done?" Zell spread his hands. "Locked him in the detention center? Told him to consider the wisdom of his actions? Threatened him? Tried to talk him out of it?" Zell laughed, the sound unpleasant.
Quistis folded her arms over her chest. "This is serious."
"You think I don't know that?" he snapped. "Do you anyone is more aware of that than I am? He'd already made up his mind. What was I supposed to do?"
"Fine. What do you suggest we do now?" she asked.
"I suggest we let Seifer do his job. He's spent his entire life doing things that should have been impossible, and I suggest we recognize that fact and get the hell out of his way. He'll come back, Fujin in tow, with the first solid intelligence we've had since the fall of Garden."
"And if he doesn't come back?"
Zell's face hardened. "If he doesn't come back, it means we're fighting a war we have no chance of winning." Zell swallowed.
* *
"Party's over, Squall," she sighed into the empty room, looking over at her fallen Knight.
Rinoa entered the infirmary room, the wine-colored silk of her gown rustling as she moved.
"It went really well. Ambassador Shackleton was falling all over himself to thank me."
She paused, then, smiling: "You should have seen your father. He had his shirt untucked and his bowtie undone before he even reached the embassy. Kiros said Laguna can't last more than five minutes in formalwear.
"It was really nice. I wish... you could've been there."
She stood at his bedside a moment, and felt heavy with the weight of his absence. Ever since her apotheosis -- that wonderful, horrible, strange moment when she became a Sorceress - she'd felt Squall. In their first hug aboard the Ragnarok, something passed between them, and she'd had an awareness of Squall, a feeling of his presence with her. In that instant, he took up the mantle as her Knight, and she'd never felt alone since then.
Until now.
When Squall first fell into his sleep, she didn't notice it, but the sensation had grown with every passing day. Now, it hurt. She felt as if she'd lost a piece of herself.
Rinoa sat down in the chair next to Squall's bed and glanced over at him, sighing again. Her helplessness pained her. She'd cared for Squall before - not that he needed it - when he came back to Garden with the inevitable injuries. This time, though, she couldn't do anything for him. Just watch and hope.
She peeled off her opera gloves, folding them and placing them on the small table. She removed her shoes and stood up, climbing into the bed with Squall. She wrapped one of his arms around her and listened to his heartbeat, regular but distant.
Rinoa closed her eyes, trying to imagine herself back in their shared room or in a hotel somewhere - anywhere, in short, but a hospital bed in the Infirmary.
"Come back, Squall," she murmured. "I need you."
Soon enough, she had fallen asleep.
* *
"Hey, pretty lady."
Fujin jumped, almost falling off her bed in the process. For a moment, she thought the detention center, with its unrelenting white, had cracked her. She'd heard a voice in the otherwise empty room. Not just any voice, either. His.
"Calm down," came the voice again. "It's me."
"SEIFER?" she whispered. "WHERE?"
"Up here, of course."
She glanced up to the ceiling, her eye searching out the sound of his voice: the air duct, a good twenty feet off the floor.
"I'll be right down," he said. "You need to catch the grille as it drops, though."
"UNDERSTOOD," Fujin replied, moving into place beneath the duct.
She heard a clunk, loud, but not audible outside the cell. Then another one, and the grille fell out of its place. Fujin caught it and looked up - the shaft extended upward vertically for a good fifteen feet. It seemed impossibly narrow as Seifer slid down it, feet first. He landed on the ground, hard, and Fujin went to him, sweeping him up in a hug.
"Careful," he said, wincing.
She stepped back. "WHAT?"
Seifer closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He took a deep breath and his arms jerked as he wrenched them back into their sockets. When he opened his eyes, the pain had him on the verge of tears.
"Of all my escape routes, that was my least favorite," he explained, rotating his arms in an effort to restore their motion. "Climb the wall, remove the grille, hold it in my teeth, dislocate my shoulders, put it back into place, and wriggle my way through the ducts. I can think of more fun ways to escape."
"LIKE?"
Seifer grinned and pressed something on his belt. The door to the room slid open, and Fujin stared.
"The front door, perhaps?"
"HOW?"
He dangled something in front of Fujin's face.
"I happened to be on the third floor, so I stopped by and picked up Xu's spare handlink."
"PLAN?"
"The elevator's little better than a fishbowl, so I want to steer clear of it. We go through the warrens to where they open into the library storeroom. The whole library is unguarded, so we come out there, take a quick jog through the main concourse, and hit the parking garage."
"EASY."
He shrugged, the gesture making him wince again. "It lacks my usual panache, but it'll do."
* *
He hears them before they arrive. She has not miscalculated, and they appear at the main concourse, coming out of the library.
His other brain buzzes - he has grown accustomed to the sound, and it no longer hurts him, except when it says "Err." It chatters constantly, giving him feedback on the temperature of the surrounding area, the condition of his own body, and a host of other trivia. When he stares at her for too long, he can see her heat rise, the flush moving into her cheeks as she chides him. He can see minute signs of stress in the walls, he can see the air currents moving through rooms. He hears the thud of her heart, its pace increasing as she anticipates the coming battle.
A memory from his past flits through his mind, a memory from his old life. It lives in the soft, fleshy part of his brain, but soon enough, the comforting assurance of his new mind takes over. The old words escape him, but the new words wash over him with a pleasant chill.
SeeD Protocols: ยง14(1)(a):
Knowledge = Power
"Knowledge is power," he murmurs. "And I am a god."
He sees them.
Cross referencing with available profiles...
Target Identified: Almasy
Renegade SeeD
Head of Security Department. Gunblade specialist.
Expert Level Proficiencies: Traps, Escapology, Improvised Weaponry, History...
High-Level Proficiencies: Demolition, Psychology, Martial Arts, Medicine...
Assume all other proficiencies at normal SeeD level or above
Confirmed enemy
Extremely dangerous. Approach with caution. Use extreme force.
Cancel target
Objective Identified: Fujin
Renegade SeeD
Psychological Operations. Chakram specialist.
Expert Level Proficiencies: Psychology, Interrogation, Criminology, Forensics...
High Level Proficiencies: Writing, Literature, Sign Language, Martial Arts...
Assume all other proficiencies at normal level or above
Confirmed target
Extremely dangerous. Approach with caution. Apprehend with minimal force.
Secure target at all costs.
"Weapons.prg" loading...
He wants to hurt her. He remembers the hours spent suffering at Fujin's hands. He remembers the blood, the pain. It will take force to subdue her, and this pleases him.
They do not look at him, though. He wants to see them shudder, wants to see the shift in their body temperatures as the fear bathes them. He looks forward to seeing blood, watching the gentle shift in colors as it cools to room temperature.
They look past him, to Scarlet. He knows what they see. The same resemblance that confused him in his first waking moments, that strange likeness that made his brain say "Err." Seifer's mouth hangs open, speechless.
Fujin, though, manages a word.
"QUISTIS?"
* *
The sound of her warhorse's hooves hung heavy in the air. She rode across a vast, empty plain, long since devoid of life. She had the sensation that she'd ridden for quite some time, yet Rinoa did not feel tired. She had no destination in mind, but felt drawn forward. The device on her shield spoke volumes to her purpose: a winged lion sejant - sitting - before a swan rising.
Soon enough, she saw her goal - a wide field of flowers, one that she would recognize anywhere. It never failed to amaze her, seeing so much life in the middle of so much devastation. The Lunar Cry destroyed the Centra continent eighty years ago, and the field of flowers seemed out of context in such a dead place.
The field rippled and shimmered with life under the morning sun. The breeze made her azure cape rustle, the snowy-white wings embroidered on the back moving with it. After the cracked and blasted wasteland that made up Centra, the explosion of flowers delighted her: reds and yellows, purples and oranges, all mixed without regard. Butterflies of every description played among them, and Rinoa felt like a giant, an armored intruder trespassing in their kingdom.
She felt Squall. The pull came to her, faint and fragile, but present.
They'd made a promise here, once. That they would always find each other here, that if something separated them, they would return to the flowers and find each other. It saved Squall from Time Compression, and so it seemed natural that they would return in dreams.
Either she had entered his dreams, or he had entered hers. Or, perhaps, they inhabited some shared reality, created from their distinctive bond. Rinoa didn't care. She'd found Squall, and now she'd bring him back.
The orphanage rose on the horizon, but something struck her as wrong. The building loomed too large, too enormous. She recognized the original structure, but as her eyes roamed over it, she noticed a host of changes: towers and battlements, a moat and portcullis.
The orphanage, made perfect in the mind of a SeeD. A childhood residence converted into a fortress.
When she had drawn near enough, Rinoa dismounted, burnished armor dazzling in the sunlight. She cringed at her first few steps, loathe to trample the flowers. She looked back, though, to see them springing back into place. She smiled, and continued walking towards the fortress.
It had a moat, yes, but no drawbridge. An expanse of running water separated Rinoa from her goal.
She closed her eyes and dug inside herself, searching for the magic. It usually came unbidden, in moments of desperation, but she'd spent time, by herself, working to master it. Somewhere inside her, beyond all the parts that made up Rinoa, lived something More-Than-Rinoa. Some connection to a greater whole - not just to her Knight, but to the Sorcerers and Sorceresses that came before, dating all the way back to Hyne. She had fleeting memories, impressions, glimpses of a thousand past lives. Something in her remembered forging the world from the stuff of pure chaos, of shaping entire continents using nothing but the force of her will.
She found that, and she tugged.
Rinoa's cape melted away as her wings manifested. They grew from her back, yet somehow passed through her armor. They stretched, once, and she ascended into the sky.
She had never flown before, but that dim, ancient part of her remembered riding the breeze eons before the birth of land. It remembered when the flowers beneath her existed as mere potential, and when the stones of the fortress existed as mountains buried beneath a roiling sea.
She climbed in slow circles, rising up towards the highest tower of the fortress. She swept through the window and landed on the floor, kneeling.
As she rose, she looked around the room, finding it barren, except for Squall and a mirror. He looked - not looked, stared - into the mirror, with infinite pain in his eyes. She'd seen that pain before, knew what thoughts claimed his mind when he had that look. She stood over his shoulder and gazed into the mirror with him.
War. Blood. Destruction. Homes shattered, lives ended. Treachery and betrayal. Hatred and pain. And presiding over it all, a man with a face like a skull, one eye burning with insanity, the other a morass of endless night.
"Squall," she breathed. Rinoa wrapped her arms around him, her wings enfolding them both in a cocoon of white feathers.
"It's okay, Squall. I'm here."
Still, he stared. She'd blocked the mirror from his view, but still he stared. She released him and turned to the mirror, with its cascading madness.
Anger welled up within her, and the magic rose easily this time, responding to her rage. That primeval part of her consciousness saw the mirror for its component parts, remembered back to a time before its existence. Rinoa's will lashed outward and unmade the mirror.
It shimmered and rippled, beads of mercury running down the walls. Tin crumpled and folded, shaping itself back to a hunk of formless rock. The glass shattered into fragments, and the fragments shattered as they fell to the ground, reverting into a pile of sand.
"See, Squall?" she implored. "It's not real. It's just a memory. It can't hurt you."
Still, he would not stop staring. His eyes remained fixed on the spot where the mirror once rested.
She stood in front of him, blocking his view with her body. She reached inside herself once more, but no magic would suffice. She needed to reach him, to find the words that would undo this spell.
"We can't change it, Squall. It's real. It happened." She swallowed, and took a deep breath. Her hand dropped to her side, unsurprised to find a weapon there. She drew it, holding it at eye level, even less surprised to find that she held Squall's gunblade Lionheart.
"But we can make it right. We can avenge the dead, and reclaim what's ours."
She held it out to him, taking his right hand and closing it over the hilt with hers. She saw a spark of life.
"And to do that... we fight."
Squall's eyes flickered down to meet hers.