The sun is at its highest point of the day and the air's hot and stuffy. There's no wind to speak of among the trees of the small forest and Squall's already considering going back to the beach, to where the other children are playing and squealing and cooling off in the water under Matron's watching eyes. He can't swim yet, but Matron would surely hold his hand as he walks at the edge of the water and she'd rub his back with soothing sun lotion and hadn't he heard something about ice-cream later in the afternoon, too? He should definitely--
Something moving on the ground catches Squall's eye. Something green the size of his fore-arm and jerking erratically, only a few paces ahead of him. He promptly forgets the beach, and the ice-cream, too, and hurries toward it, curiosity making him ignore everything Matron's ever tried to drill into him about the dangers of creatures and things unknown.
He stops just in front of it, tilting his head thoughtfully to the side. He knows he has seen something like this before, remembers the shape and colours, and he smiles as he suddenly recognizes it from the older children's bestiary textbooks. It's a Caterchipillar. A small one, only a baby.
He squats down in front it and jumps a little when it jerks particularly wildly. There's something oozing out of its side, looking sort of like that one time when Selphie cut herself on a shard of glass and blood oozed out of her like water from a tap and she had to be bandaged and Matron fussed over her for days while the girl kept complaining about the pain.
With a start he realizes that the Caterchipillar's hurt. Badly.
He starts to reach out toward it, but pulls his hands back, not sure what to do, and clenches them into small fists at his sides, thinking hard.
"Are you scared of it?"
The interrupting voice makes Squall purse his lips in annoyance and he turns to look at the blond boy squatting down next to him, scowling at the taunting smirk on the other's lips.
He's busy, really, but he can't not respond. "No."
He looks back down at the hurt and squirming baby Caterchipillar in its pool of greenish, sticky goo and tries to figure out what would be the right thing to do: leaving it where it is or ending its misery. What is it that Matron always says? About Hyne and the doing unto others and the sinning?
He frowns.
The other boy pokes the larva with a stick, nose screwing up in disgust and eyes widening with morbid fascination as the Caterchipillar draws itself up in a tight ball.
The boy pokes some more, snickering at the way the goo squelches, before turning toward Squall, opening his mouth to say something but closing it again when he catches sight of Squall's expression.
Squall is still peering down at the dying creature, face very serious, brows knitted together, small hands twitching with indecision. His skin is itching all over from the frustration; he really can't decide. He can't remember whether Hyne would consider it worse to kill the thing or to let it twitch its own way to a slow and painful death.
"Hey, Squall… wha'cha doin'? " the other boy finally asks, but Squall doesn't answer, doesn't even hear him, and eventually the blond shrugs, bored with this game of doing absolutely nothing and shuffles away, hitting overhanging branches with the stick as he goes.
Squall sucks his lower lip into his mouth, worries it between his teeth, his mind whirling as he weighs option against option to the best of his young brain's abilities, but he's still no closer to a decision, still can't remember.
As he watches, the Caterchipillar's twitches grow further and further apart as the pool of goo keeps inching itself closer and closer to Squall's feet, and the shadows around him stretch out with longer and longer fingers until they mesh entirely with the light and there is only semi-darkness left under a bloated moon.
He gazes up at the evening sky, straining his tired eyes to see the face of Hyne in the surface of the moon. He seeks out the eyes and the mouth, and then closes his own eyes, as Matron has taught him, and prays Hyne to take the bad away, to make it good again, to help him because he's just a small boy and he has no idea what to do and the Caterchipillar's hurting and he can't remember if he's supposed to kill it or leave and let it die.
He feels his eyes starting to burn with frustration over his mind's treacherous inadequacy, and tears of sorrow for the poor Caterchipillar steal their way down, stinging where they run over cheeks burnt from much too long time in high summer sun.
Something cool touches his toes and his eyes fly open. He looks down and sees that the goo has reached all the way to his feet. He scrambles a few paces back, his nose wrinkling at the feel of dirt and pebbles clinging to his now-sticky toes.
He turns his attention back to the baby Caterchipillar, waiting for the next twitch.
The Caterchipillar is very still.
Squall counts to one hundred breaths, but the Caterchipillar doesn't twitch. It doesn't, in fact, move at all.
He stares at it, his face gone absolutely slack, and then pokes it with one small finger.
Nothing.
He stares for a moment longer and then, eyes widening, whips his head up to look incredulously at the moon. The face of Hyne seems to be half-smiling. And, to his mind, it doesn't seem like a particularly nice smile.
He stands up, whimpering just a little at the soreness of his knees, and maybe some at the unfairness of something he can't really wrap his mind around yet, and trudges back to the lighthouse.
fin
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Notes: Umm, see this is what I get when I try to write me some nice SxS. Well, at least it's FF8, right?