Language Barrier

by Skandranon email:

A Final Fantasy VIII fanfic

Not yaoi, not romance. Not that good, either, but wth. Introspectivishnessity.

Warnings: Rated R for blood. Lots and lots of blood. Kinda icky. And some cussing. I don't like to censor myself. Also, AU, sorta.

Summary: There's more to Irvine than you think. Based on a new age philosophy that I happen to believe. Status: Complete. Has absolutely nothing to do with my other fanfics.

By the time we reached Irvine, his heart had stopped.

It wasn't pretty. A gunner up close is still pretty powerful, but not as powerful as a melee fighter. And even the best gunner is not as powerful up close as ten bladers, especially when he's surrounded.

He'd been hacked, slashed, diced, and pretty much assaulted with blades in any way you can be assaulted with blades. He'd lost almost all of his blood, and most of his vital organs were dissected. The worrying part, really, was the head injury. A gash three inches into the skull. Wounds can be mended. Blood can be replaced. The brain is a delicate thing. If we cured the injury, it would fuse the brain in places it shouldn't be fused, resulting in brain damage. If we left it alone until we got him to a hospital, the blood would seep into areas it shouldn't be, and most likely the injury would never fully heal, resulting in brain damage. It's a damn annoying situation.

Five curagas, three phoenix downs, and the heart started pumping again. Quistis kept pumping Curas into him as we carried him to the Ragnarok, and Zell ran ahead to fetch the emergency kit. I swear that, for one brief moment as we hauled him to the surface, I saw his eyes flutter open. He looked at me, his lips moved a milimeter, and then he was out again.

He died eighteen times on the way to Balamb. His lungs were nothing more than so much bloody mess. It was only a ten minute flight, but everytime we brought him back to the living, his heart would beat a few moments, a minute at most, and then stop. By the time we got him to the infirmary, the number had reached twenty-two.

It's a good thing we got him there then, since we only had twenty one phoenix downs on hand. I horded them like golden treasures, and had expected them to last me over a year. It almost dissapointed me to see them poured into him one after the other, to a mere moment's effect.

The next time I saw him was twelve hours later, when Kadowaki finally yielded and let other doctors take their turn operating. Somehow, he looked more gruesome then than when we found him. Stitching ran all over him, more IVs were jammed into him than I could count, a great terrible machine was doing his breathing. There was more blood in the room than room. I only saw him for a brief second, while the door swung as Kadowaki traded places with a less exhausted medic. Quistis was still going and snarled at anyone who said the word "rest" to her.

I saw him again when I woke up. Damn Kadowaki and her sedatives. Irvine was the only patient, and I had been given a spare cot.

It was nine hours later, and they had finally got him stable. Quistis was dead to the world, curled up in a metal chair. Kadowaki had been given the day off. Zell brought me coffee, Selphie brought me news. He would live.

He was in a coma, and frankly it was the best place he could be right now. He was on every type of life support available, with a tube down his throat and other tubes in every orifice the cursed doctors could find. His chest rose and fell in an exact pattern punctuated by beeps. His shooting arm was doomed to be near useless, and so was his left eye. If he ever walked again, it would be with a limp.

For the rest of my life, I wondered what it was that made his attackers so angry.

Once he regained consciousness and his ability to walk on his own, he fled to Galbadia, claiming a need to "be on my own and deal with this". We understood, and helped him bribe the doctors into releasing him.

He would have to go through life with one kidney, and one and a half lungs. His intestines had been a difficult jigsaw to put together. He was missing a finger.

Imagine my surprise a month later when he waltzed into the Garden healthier than I was.

He never gave an explanation, just shrugging and leaving it at "I got better". His sight was so close to 20/20, it wasn't measurable as anything but. His shooting arm was stronger than the other one. He could run mile laps and not feel a thing. I could kill to learn the truth, but he would simply shrug, smile that damned unreadable smile, and wander off to get something to drink.

Most of the gang wrote it off as "one of those things that only happen to us", and in a week it was forgotten. Selphie would sometimes watch Irvine with an eerily scrutinous look in her eyes, especially when he used a gun, but she never commented. In fact, she was the first to write it off as "7.3 on the weird shit-o-meter, moving on".

Half a year later, as capable as he ever had been, a building fell on top of him.

Three stories of concrete rubble, one Irvine Kinneas, over two hundred bone fractures. No lasting effects.

Three months later, he and Selphie were driving their spiffy new wheeltoy, and they were hit by a drunk driver. T-bone on Selphie's side. She was rendered a vegetable for life. Irvine stayed by her bed for two weeks, refusing to leave for more than bathroom breaks. We had to bring him food to keep him alive. For hours on end, he would just hold her hand, gazing into space, eyebrows furrowed as if concentrating. Never cried.

On the fifteenth day, she woke up.

As soon as she was safely stable, I grabbed Irvine and hauled him out for a "celebratory drink". I bought him four bottles of fine Galbadian whiskey before asking him how the hell he did it.

He smiled and shrugged, and for a moment I expected him to just slur "She go' be''er". But his shrug made him wobble, and his smile was a bit wider than unreadable. He was an excellent drinker, but Galbadian whiskey is an excellent drink.

"I's all a ma''er oknowin' yerself."

I sipped my coke. I had stopped drinking after my second beer. He had been on his third bottle by then, and hadn't noticed. "What do you mean, 'knowing yourself'?"

He sniffed, and wiggled his nose thoughtfully. "Ye know yerself, ye know th' world, an' ye can' change i'."

He babbled on like this for a while, then lost the topic for a while and mused on the glory of breasts, and then, two hours later, he started making a little more sense.

"I's an ol' Galba'ian trick."

"Never seen a Galbadian do it before you."

"Nah, no' all Galba'ianz. Jus' few, in th' wes'ern plains. On'y knew one oth'r preson couldoit."

"How do you do it?"

Irvine tried to steeple his fingers and made a hopeless mess of them. "Well, 'ow dyo move yer arm?"

Trusting Irvine was going somewhere with this and would finish before passing out, I answered. "Your brain tells the muscles to move, and the impulse runs through your body to the arm, and it moves."

Irvine nodded sagely, then blinked many times to clear his dizziness. "'Ow does yer body 'eal?"

"Your subconscious mind tells the body to repair the damage, and the body draws from energy stores and incoming energy sources to heal."

That won him a sloppy smile. "An' how dyo breathe?"

I frowned. "Your subconscious tells your lungs to expand and contract, and they do."

"Bu' what if you wan' to breathe, right now, before yer sposed to?"

"I…you tell your lungs to breathe."

Irvine nodded as if the answers to the universe had just been answered.

I had to admit I was lost. "You lost me."

"You can tell yer lungs ta breathe wi' yer conshus, an' they will. You blink wi'out thinkin', but ya can also blink wit' thinkin'. Wheneva ya wan' to."

"So?"

"So," he paused for a long period to steady himself, hands frozen in a halted gesture. "So, so, you can 'eal by tellin' yerself to too. I's jus', mos' people don'."

"What?"

"Body's got a lang'age all its own. Mos' people don' both'r ta learn it, 's'all. Ya can tell yerself ta do near'y anythin', not jus' move."

"Healing by simply telling your body to do so?" I snorted. "Sounds like some new age spiritual nonsense."

Irvine shrugged and chugged his whiskey. "If'n ya say so."

I pondered this for a long while, but thankfully not too long, otherwise the question that occurred to me would have been said to someone far too drunk to answer it. "But, how did you heal Selphie?"

Irvine grinned and slid a little farther down onto the bar. "Ya'd b'sprised wat ya can say ta somewun ifya know de righ' wordz."

And he promptly passed out.