I own nothing but the general plotline. Characters and situations are the product of their respective creators.
Thanks out to my great prereaders: Diana, Natalia, and Chris. Hopefully Greg will beat the game soon and be back on board…
Also, thanks to dragonchic, SoulofFlame, emouse, whoever Me is, and of course Alexia for your reviews and thoughts…they were very encouraging. ^_~
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THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
Chapter 1: The Dreams of Defeat
By: nakigoe-chan
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"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
-T.S. Eliot
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After everything I had been through, everything that was going on, I expected nightmares. But the horror that would leave me gasping and sweat-soaked in bed, night after night, wasn't what I expected. They weren't as bad as I expected.
Because I never once dreamed of Squall's death.
Of course, I didn't need to dream to remember that. It was ingrained in me. I felt like an old blind woman, unable to see beyond that which had disfigured me.
And oh, how his death disfigured me.
I never even told him that I loved him. I never got the chance.
I had always assumed that I would, after we defeated Ultimecia. I assumed there would be a happily-ever-after, a honeymoon period, a summer sequel. Even though we all knew how dangerous she was, the perilous state of our mission, none of us really grasped the fact that she had more than a decent chance to win. Which she did.
Win, that is.
She won. And he died.
And I died with him.
I thought that if she won she would kill us all – or the world would be warped into one in which humanity could no longer survive. But she only killed him. The rest of us...were kept alive, if you define the word by a beating heart, respiration, and the ability to reason. He was the only one she feared could still challenge her, I suppose. I never really knew. But the rest of us were no threat. She didn't even seal my sorceress abilities. At first, I didn't understand why. I certainly wasn't going to ask her.
I was going to kill her. If I could.
The only problem was, I couldn't.
I tried, once. It was a murder attempt out of clichéd storybooks – in the dead of night, I bespelled her guards and crept to her bedside. She seemed almost elegant in her repose, lying on her back as a corpse would in a coffin; hands folded neatly, hair arranged beautifully rather than mussed by sleep. I raised Squall's Lionheart gunblade high over my head, preparing to end her life and, somehow, bring back the world I'd lost; the world where Squall waited for me in a field of endless flowers.
I couldn't kill her. I couldn't bring the gunblade down. And I was very well aware that this wasn't because of any spell or enchantment on her or on me – it was some part of my own will, something my subconscious would not allow me to turn my back on.
She opened her eyes. She sat up, her eyes never leaving mine, not even to flick to the gunblade that was poised over her, ready to end her life.
She smiled, and I wanted to be sick. Perhaps it would purge me of my self-revulsion.
"I suppose," she said, in that melodic voice that did not fit at all with her horrible features, "that you don't even remember."
"Remember?" I choked out.
"No..." she whispered to me. "No, of kourse you don't."
There was a moment of silence when I watched her and she watched me. It would have been funny – I would have expected one of those huge tumbleweeds to come rolling through – if I hadn't been so disgusted with her and, more than that, with myself. I'd had my chance, but I had failed to take it.
"You will," she finally said.
"Will what?"
"Remember." Another horrible smile. "You served me, fought for me, died for me, in far more lifetimes than I kan kount. Your loyalty to me and mine was unlimited."
Rage and terror gripped me. What the hell was she talking about?! "Never!"
"Ah," she breathed, "denial. It will simply make the end more...dramatik. In previous lives, you would have killed Leonhart yourself if I'd asked it of you."
I found myself weeping, for she quite obviously believed every word she said.
"Never," I repeated, this time a whisper.
"You will remember," she whispered back. "You will remember everything." She reached forward and caressed my cheek – with that horrible hand, the hand that killed Squall – and I felt a flash of ice. "The memories start tonight, Rinoa...but no, that isn't your name, is it? The nightmares start tonight."
I could only gasp and recoil.
"Your soul will skream, my little firefly." She bared yellowed fangs in a grin. "I kan't wait."
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She had warned me, but it wasn't what I expected.
She told me nightmares, and I expected the cliché – death of my friends, torture and bloodshed, chaos, mayhem, yadda yadda yadda.
But this was impossible.
Another world, another dimension, another time, found me scared, alone, dying – and all of thirteen years old. I was a lost soul in a city called Tokyo, watched over (if you use the term loosely) by a scientist father and a tall, cold, and beautiful redhead by the name of Kaolinite. She looked like a vampire, which, technically, she wasn't – but I saw, as the child who I inhabited did not, that she was certainly not a human.
The dream moved as all dreams do – through flashes of memory, bits and pieces. The common theme was obvious: the child whose body my dreamself inhabited had no friends. Classmates shied away from her in terror; people on the street pointedly ignored her. She was an outcast; made so by abilities she could not control.
She felt, I realized, as I had when, landing the Ragnarok, the men had come to take the dreaded sorceress away and Squall had stood helplessly by. As if everyone feared me for no good reason. No one understood because no one tried to understand. Squall had come for me, but I saw no face – in the dozens that flashed before this girl's innocent eyes – with the kind of compassion and caring that I had found in him.
This child – I did not even know her name – was completely alone.
Why was Ultimecia showing me this?
Suddenly, a memory of this child blurred into focus. She was in a bedroom with her father, dressed only in a tank top and boxers. She looked down at herself, and I saw what before was obscured by dark tights and long sleeves.
This girl was a cyborg.
I wondered, idly, if that was why everyone feared her. I didn't think so; while I had seen no other cyborgs in this girl's world, all evidence indicated that her condition was a well-kept secret.
But it certainly explained why this girl was so weak; illness was eating away at her, killing her. Her father was trying to save her, but sooner or later there would be no human left, and this child – whoever she was – would be gone.
She looked up into a mirror.
I could feel, despite the fact that I was dreaming, my heart contract painfully. It wasn't the child's heart; it was the heart of the Rinoa Heartilly I knew myself as, lying asleep somewhere.
Lying asleep, and dreaming of a self she didn't remember.
This child had my face.
Oh, there were little differences – her skin was paler than mine, her hair darker, her eyes purple instead of hazel – but that element that one always recognizes in oneself was there; it was obvious. The way you look at baby pictures and think, 'oh, yes, I can see that was me...' was the way I saw this child.
But it still didn't make sense.
Because while everyone feared this child, I was, for this dream, living within her – and she wasn't evil.
This was the me Ultimecia was trying to show me, the me Ultimecia realized I didn't remember being – but this me was no demon.
Why, then, did a monster like Ultimecia believe she held this child's will in the palm of her hand?
I awoke.
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We couldn't face each other anymore.
We would see each other, but we were lost. Our connection, the bond we had such faith in, had shattered the moment Squall died, and instead of having shared grief unite us, we moved about and avoided contact like strangers.
Like so many of my other illusions about what might result should we lose to Ultimecia, the belief that, should we live, we would be prisoners and slaves proved false. The sorceress must have known that such pain would distract us from the devastation we might have been able to prevent.
So while we couldn't leave her palace, she left Selphie, Quistis, Irvine, Zell, and I alone. Even Edea and Laguna were left to their own devices.
I hadn't seen Seifer since our defeat, but I knew he was somewhere; lurking about the castle, wracked with god knows what emotion. Was he sad? Guilty? Angry? Or satisfied? I couldn't guess, and I didn't really care.
He had tried to kill me, but I was ready to forgive him. I had known him forever, and while so many illusions of him had been shattered through the great adventure, I knew, somewhere deep down, that despite his aspirations toward power and selfish drive he wasn't a bad person. Obnoxious, maybe, but not evil. We all knew what evil was, now.
In fact, some days found me searching for him. At least I could have been honest with him; at least I could look him in the eye, even if I wasn't sure he could reciprocate.
The others were alien to me. I couldn't talk to them, especially after my failed assassination attempt. They didn't know about it, of course, but I still felt I'd failed them.
They couldn't face me, either.
I would run into one, occasionally, and we would make pathetic attempts at conversation. But they still saw me as the one who had brought Squall out of his shell. Without Squall, they didn't know Rinoa.
Not that they talked to each other, either.
Irvine no longer flirted, no longer joked. Zell couldn't eat a hotdog without throwing up – and yes, they were available. Ultimecia reveled in the irony of giving us every comfort of home and watching it destroy us. Selphie had lost herself – her personality was so oriented in the positive that now, faced with the fact that there was no positive left, she no longer recognized her reflection.
Quistis had become entirely mute.
She could manage to nod, or make an attempt at a half-smile in greeting, but she had made no sound at all since our defeat. She always did have a problem with depression.
Laguna was full of gallows' humor; he'd lost all of his cheerful naïveté. Edea tried to unite us, hold us together, but really it was a lost cause and we all knew it. So time was spent stalking in the shadows of the hallways, unable to remain still, never looking out the windows because of the gut-wrenching guilt. Sometimes one of us would run off to find Ultimecia in mindless, weaponless fury, only to lose themselves in the labyrinth of the castle and find that they were too weak to face themselves, much less take on single-handedly an all-powerful sorceress.
And time went on. I don't know how much. It can't have been as long as it seemed.
The dreams kept coming. They weren't even nightmares at the beginning; they were just sad. They repeated themselves and jumped around and, for the most part, made no sense at all. They were always about the cyborg girl. They never once told me her name. They confused me, though they never really frightened me.
But that was about to change.
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Then, one night, everything went backwards. My dreamself was suddenly only seven or so, and her situation was completely different. For one thing, she wasn't a cyborg.
I saw her mother for the first time. She was a beautiful lady – so much like mine – who obviously doted lavishly upon her only daughter. The father was in this dream, too; but he wasn't the distant man he would later become. He was what I had always wanted MY father to be: loving, kind, fun, and attentive.
What had made him into the ice statue of this child's older years?
I was jealous of my dreamself's childhood; it was carefree and beautiful and full of love.
The next night that emotion was completely washed away as I watched, through the girl's eight-year-old eyes, the fire that had cost her mother her life. Her mother came into the burning lab to save her daughter; she succeeded, but paid with her life. The child herself barely lived; she was in a coma for months afterward, and burned horribly all over her body.
Well, that certainly explained the cyborg element.
It quickly became obvious through the following vague flashes that this was the father's turning point. In a desperate attempt to salvage what his beloved wife had sacrificed her life to rescue, he poured his soul into his work. His child's preservation – at least in the physical sense – became everything. He drew no limits on his work, and was kicked out of the university he had established for publishing research that went too far.
And then the memories became distinct again. The girl, still only eight or so, was on her knees surrounded by water and broken glass. A dead goldfish lay before her, and she was wailing in that desperate yowl only children can manage.
"Who did this?" She sobbed. "Who killed Goldie?"
A shadow fell across her, and she looked up.
I had forgotten about Kaolinite.
The woman's cold smirk was malicious. Her obvious distaste for the child whose eyes I watched her through spoiled her good looks. "What are you talking about?" she asked, in a low, liquid voice. "You did this."
"No, I didn't!" The child was frightened by the accusation, but I could see through her mind – as if it were my own, or once was – that she had no memory of doing it. She wasn't guilty.
"Of course you did," Kaolinite said, triumph in her voice. "Now clean up this mess."
The child went back to howling.
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I awoke. Howling. I felt so close to this nameless child by that point – so much like a part of her – that occasionally I would let her emotions spill into mine, even in the waking world.
"I didn't do it!" I wept. "It's not my fault!"
Then again, perhaps the waking world was the cause of my screams. It was, after all, much more worthy of them.
I would have given anything to have Squall hold me in that moment. Not that I had anything left to give. And there were far, far worse moments to come, though I didn't know it then.
A gentle hand wiped a tear from my eye, and for an instant I thought it was him.
Quistis stared down at me with worried eyes shaded by disheveled blond hair. I must have woken her, calling out in my sleep. We'd all done it, but no one had ever had the courage to seek out the screamer to comfort them.
I stared into those blue eyes for what seemed like forever. And for the first time since Squall's death, I saw genuine concern for me in someone else. She'd cared for him so much, and she'd known what he meant to me. What I meant to him. She thought I'd been dreaming about him, and she couldn't bear it. And suddenly, whatever the dreams meant, they didn't matter in the least.
I threw my arms around her and sobbed. Big, choking, sniveling, disgusting sobs.
"I want him back!" I bawled. "Make him come back!"
Quistis was obviously taken entirely by surprise because of the personal bubbles we'd all erected – none of us had seen another cry, although everyone walked around with blotchy eyes and tear-stained cheeks – but she wrapped her arms around me and held me and rubbed my back. She said nothing, but I understood.
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Of everyone, Quistis was probably the one I thought least likely to become the person I would let beyond my barriers. I'd bonded with everyone else at some point (Irvine with the desert prison rescue attempt, Zell with the Griever ring, Selphie because of the little musical performance and because, well…she was Selphie), but Quistis had always set herself slightly apart. Probably because I'd gained what she always wanted – Squall. But in her own way she was just as reserved as he had been, and I guess I had a talent for bringing down those walls of isolation.
She still didn't talk, but we understood each other. We walked together in the hallways; we cried together, we held each other's hand. I couldn't have lasted much longer without her. I told her everything, and she always listened.
Well, everything except the nightmares and my foiled assassination attempt.
Squall had told me once that she used to be a teacher at the Garden, but had been fired because she lacked leadership qualities. I never understood that less than the time after Ultimecia defeated us, despite the personal effect it had on her.
But we helped each other most of all by being there when we heard the other crying out in her sleep. That was the only time I ever heard a sound from her, when she screamed in her nightmares. I was absurdly proud of myself, that I could help her get through that, that I could be the one to comfort her. It was those times when I thought the bond between all of us was not nearly as translucent as I thought.
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Then, one night, something happened that changed everything.
Another angst filled dream of the child-that-I-once-was sent me crying into consciousness, only to find Quistis standing above me – her face covered with blood. Her blood.
And I was suddenly very aware of the feeling of torn skin under my nails and blood on my palms.
I'd...done that...?
Quistis was staring at me, half in worry for me, half in terror for her own safety.
"Oh, Hyne, Quistis," I gasped. "I'm so sorry." She took a deep, shaky breath and stepped back away from me. I tumbled out of bed toward her, and tripped over my hair.
My hair was long and black and trailed to the floor, spilling like liquid ebony around my feet.
What the HELL?!
I raced beyond Quistis to the bathroom, yanking the water tap so hard that the porcelain cracked. I scrubbed at my hands and under my fingernails so hard that soon there was blood on them again – my blood.
Why did I feel so horribly guilty about this? Why did I feel like my body, without the knowledge of my waking self, had done this on purpose, with the specific intent of hurting my friend?
And what was with my hair?
I stared at my reflection in the bloody water, gasping for breath and fighting back tears. Through blurry vision, I saw something appear, for an instant, on my forehead. A small pentagram – a black, five-pointed star.
I whipped my head up to look in the mirror.
The pentagram was gone.
I sighed in the inexplicable relief that came with knowing it was just my mind playing tricks on me – why had that symbol frightened me so? – and turned away.
My heart froze in my chest. I turned once again, achingly slowly, to the mirror.
Surrounded by impossibly long raven hair, my reflection stared back at me.
Through violet eyes.
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END OF PART ONE (Please R & R! PLEASE!!)
Author's Notes: [prepare yourselves for a LONG ride here, people. I am a MASTER rambler. In fact, you really don't need to read this…just go review!]
This is my first FFVIII fanfic. In fact, it's my first relatively dark fanfic. (OKAY, so everyone seems to think that 'After You' is dark just because people keep being murdered, but I just don't understand how you can think that way...^.~) So I'm worried that I suck, which means if you have flames take them elsewhere. I really don't need to hear them.
And to all the Ranma fans out there, I'm sorry. I know you guys are pulling out your hair, going "WHERE THE %&^$$% IS THE NEXT CHAPTER OF 'AFTER YOU?'" Well...I'm still writing it (in fact, I just finished chapter 8 – yes, you read that correctly, chapter 8) but the posts...well, I'm putting them off for various reasons. The next three chapters will be the middle of the story, and a big turning point. I'm unsure about after that, and I don't want to post them and then find I have to change them. The first half of chapter 6 is on my webpage, though.
ANYWAY, back to THIS story. ^_^;;
I haven't even READ all that many FFVIII fanfics. They all seem to be either 'the new adventure after the defeat of Ultimecia' or 'Seifer and Squall have sex.' Granted, there are masterful versions of both of these, and there are also some great AUs, but I wanted to go where I hadn't seen anyone go before.
Now, after Ultimecia is fine, but I couldn't come up with an original concept. As for the other thing...
I have no problem with yaoi. Two naked guys as hot as Squall and Seifer are certainly nothing to complain about. Hey, I'm a senior in an all-girls school. I've got hormones too, y'know. However, FFVIII is a love story, and it ISN'T a Seifer/Squall love story.
You can have yaoi/yuri couples that are doubtlessly meant to be (and some of my favorites…^_^). They're everywhere in anime. Look at Haruka and Michiru if you don't believe me. But in this case, the couple is Squall and Rinoa, and, last time I checked, they were not of the same sex.
I was always a little disappointed with Rinoa's role in the game. She's powerful as hell, but she's either being rescued by Squall or getting all upset because Squall gets stabbed by ice or killed by time compression. Don't get me wrong; those were masterful scenes. But Rinoa always seemed to get the short end of the stick, and you had hints all through the game that she was so much more. And people keep BASHING her. I'll grant you she has her irritating moments, but next to Selphie's train song…
Don't be afraid, Squall fans – while the story centers around Rinoa, you will see Squall. Just because he's dead doesn't mean I can't bring him in! I promise, you see him in the next chapter. (Hell, he IS, after all, my favorite character.)
Is that enough rambling for you guys? Good, because I'm pretty much done. The first half of the next chapter is already written, so I should be posting again relatively soon...ah, whatever. I'm not very good with updates, but I'm trying to improve! Really I am! (I mean, seriously – I suck at it, so the only direction I can go is up.)
Anyway, please, PLEASE review. I thrive on reviews. I'll love you forever if you review (maybe that's an overstatement, but deal with it). My email is nakigoe_chan@hotmail.com, and I love emails too. And yes, I answer all of 'em.
Ja ne!
~ nakigoe-chan