Chapter Five

Dollet, a city remembered well in history. Dollet, the city of revolution of the machines, starting the great industrial revolution less than one hundred and fifty years ago. Dollet, the city of steam works, automobiles and industrialization. Dollet, the city of the largest mechanical war machine industrial plant, the AR-NIHS, in the entire world. Dollet, the city of a confused republic, where no citizen is truly ever certain if their senator is truly for them or just seeking to gain power for his own agenda.

Dollet, a city of a confused mass, ruled by propaganda and lies and misfortune, who truly never know if the truth is truth, or a well calculated lie.

It was here, in Dollet, where a certain Senator sat at his office, far past midnight, working diligently on a certain political dilemma that had reached his weathered ears just a few hours before.

One would think that he was working hard on something that would help the people he may be representing. That the only reason that he was working so diligently into the night, with so little rest or interruptions form his staff, was to make the lives of those of Dollet a better one.

One could also be wrong.

The grandfather clock had just swung it's massive bronze hands to 4 and 12, and a series of ringing bells and chimes erupted from it's wooden form, when the Senator had finished speaking with a certain Commander that he did not enjoy speaking with, if only for the fact that this certain Commander, who was barely past his teens, held more power, than this Senator, who had been holding onto every inch of power he had ever gained for the past forty years.

Jealousy plays a large role in politics.

The Senator rubbed his hawk like eyes, once a light blue the weeks before but after countless nights of barely resting them caused them to be dark, and encircled, giving him a much more menacing appearance than his scowling lips and long nose would normally give.

The Senator's hoarse voice swore as he slammed down his cordless phone. "That fool…he has no idea what he has gotten himself into now, does he? Nah, I think that." The Senator laughed at the predictiment his victim managed to throw himself into. It was obvious that the Commander did not know of the game of politics, but the Senator was very skilled at the game. One could say he was not just skilled, but a master at it. "Yes, he is quite a fool. But, I should watch him some more. Yeah, I better not fuck this one up. Too good a chance, I think."

And then as if it was waiting for the Senator to say those exact words, the phone he had slammed on it's receiver a few moments before rung again. The Senator growled at the inconvenience, and answered it.

"Sir!" came the excited and obviously unnerved reply.

"What is it Warden?" the Senator spat out.

"You, err, um, recall the individual you personally requested the Deling Police to capture?"

A lump grew in the Senator's throat. The politician had a bad feeling where this conversation was going. "Yes, what of it?"

"Well sir, you see, somehow –we have no idea it happened -"

"Out with it man!" the Senator roared, having lost his patience hours before, when the sun was still in the afternoon sky.

"Three individuals sneaked in and helped him escape!"

"What?"

"We don't know how it happened!"

"Damn fool! Where the hell is he now?"

"We don't know! We raised the prison to twenty three stories, and they…well, they jumped."

"They jumped twenty three stories?" the Senator roared out at the uneasy Warden.

"Well, yes sir they did."

"And they survived?"

"…Y-yes sir, we believe they did. We found no corpses, only tracks…"

"You found tracks?"

"Yes sir, we followed them for a mile, and then it just ended. The dessert winds probably blew 'em away!"

The Senator formed an abominable scowl as he slammed the phone, nearly cracking it in two, with a few shards of plastic flying off of it. "Damn I hate that man! I want him dead! Dead!"

The Senator growled to himself some more as he poured him some vodka, and drank down in nearly a single gulp. Alcohol always managed to calm the Senator down, or at least it would for the time. In the end it would make him all the more ferocious.

But those few moments of when it did calm him down had the politician thinking. He knew of Ferin's personalities, his traits, his motives, even some of his childhood background, all thanks to the Senator's growing staff that would be better described as spies and murderers than an actual political staff.

A wile of a small widened on the Senator's face as the old man thought up of a most interesting idea, one that could very well reverse the situation from a bad one to a very good one.

The Senator grabbed a pen out of his shirt pocket as he searched for a note pad, wanting to write down as much of the incomplete scheme as he possibly could before all the essential details slipped from his mind.

The halls of Balamb Garden seemed to reach the sound volume of a Heavy Rock concert, or at least it did to Squall as he walked down the main hall towards the library. Despite the fact that the news media announced quite plainly of the murder of the Kramers, parents did not seem to want to pull their children out of the Garden, which proved the same case during the Crash of the Gardens a few years before. If anything, the number of students in Balamb seemed to be getting bigger.

'Just goes to show you how connected parents are to the world these days.'

Squall turned a corner, and was quickly greeted by the elderly librarian, and pointed Squall in the direction of where Zell was at, clicking away at a bunch of what would seem to be unneeded and unorganized files.

"Just a big freakin' mess" Zell grumbled to his Commander.

"So, I take it you found nothing on Ferin."

"No way! It's all spread over from one side of the database to there and over here and there, and well, you get the idea. It's crazy."

"Like no one wanted us to know anything about him."

"You sure didn't take detective classes in your seventh year?"

"Shut up" Squall grumbled as he took a seat next to the martial artist. "Have you at least found anything about him?"

"Just stuff Doctor Kadowaki already told us. Nothing we already don't know."

"Damn" Squall muttered under his breath. To him, the pieces all seemed to point to some type of strange, world changing controversy, and that's the last thing he really wanted as of right now. After Ultimecia, he just wanted to settle down with Rinoa, maybe go on a few missions here and there and return back to his dorm safe and sound. He really did not want to have to deal with this, but with him being Commander, he didn't have much choice. "So, no information on his mom then?"

"No. It got deleted, according to some error message."

"Does it say when?"

"Nope, but I do remember from Basic Computer Applications that if you get that message, it wasn't that long ago." Squall sighed again in frustration. "What about this Project GAIA that Ferin claimed to be a part of?"

"Didn't Ferin tell ya' how?"

"Yeah but…whatever. Come on, were going to Cid's office."

Zell gave his Commander a wide eyed look as he rose from his chair. "What about Rinoa? And maybe Alladra too, since she is a part of all this now."

"I already told Rinoa to meet me at the elevator, and I don't want another emotional girl on my shoulder."

"You sure?"

"Come on" Squall growled behind his teeth. Zell quickly complied and followed his Commander out of the library, but not before he closed all his work of course. When the two got to the elevator, Squall found his Sorceress and Alladra standing at the elevator. Squall, irritated as ever, swore under his breath.

"She has a right to come, to know what Ferin got into" Rinoa interjected before Squall could say a word of protest. Zell have Squall one of his 'I told you so' looks, and Squall in replied with one of his 'Shut up before I give you another black eye' expressions. Zell quickly complied with the Commander's request.

To Squall, the elevator seemed to reach the third floor in only a fraction of a second, and he noticed that everyone else was uneasy too. 'Alladra must be scared to hell about what GAIA did to Ferin, and me, well, I just don't want to see Cid's office. I just don't want to be here. Hell, I don't even want to be in Garden now.'

Squall pushed back the wide wooden double doors with an odd sense of enthusiasm, and he almost seemed to have gotten cold as he stared into Cid's bare office. The corpses were removed days ago, the blood spills wiped off, the desks and book shelves reorganized to almost exactly how Cid had organized them (which wasn't to say they were that neat to begin with). But a dark cloud seemed to have washed over Squall. After a brief moment of staring at the bare office, he headed for Cid's computer to enter in the password Ferin had given him a few days earlier.

Rinoa gave Squall a look of concern, but Squall didn't acknowledge it. That worried her a bit. 'Is he going to develop that shell again? Is he going to become cold to everyone, even me? Is he going to lose to his feelings again? Oh God, I hope not.'

Zell and Alladra trailed right behind Squall as he walked over to the computer, while Rinoa kept her distance. The computer screen lit up, and a series of numbers trailed along the screen, more likely than not a series of codes that only a programmer could make sense of. After repeating the same line of codes over and over again, the computer prompted Squall to enter a user-code.

4-8-15-16-23-42

For a moment, nothing happened. The code just stood there, almost floating on the monitor. Then, the code disappeared, and a series of windows instantly appeared on the monitor, and from there Squall didn't know where to start.

But the title of the windows gave him an idea: GAIA.

"Oh shit" Alladra swore.

"No kidding" Zell said agreeing with the Para-Magic user. "Click on that one Squall; last entry." Squall, agreeing with Zell that was perhaps the best way to start, moved his cursor over to the minimized window, and opened it. A document popped up on the maximized window, a letter of some sorts. The four of them scanned through it as they scrolled past the letter, trying to organize everything they could about this Project GAIA that Cid may or may not have been involved in.

"So, let's get this straight" Zell ordered when they read the last part of the letter. "This GAIA, it's some sort of super human project? And it used genetic matter or some bull like that to enhance specific qualities of each specimen?"

"It means each person has a unique feature to them" Rinoa clarified.

"Okay, so, err, let's look some more, ya?" No one really said anything, but Squall moving the cursor to the window, this one named 'P.7I'. When the window popped up, a series of selections appeared, ranging from 'Introduction' to 'Preparations'. Gallery intrigued Squall the most, and slid the cursor over to open it.

What they saw was horrifying. People – kids, students, junior classmen of Balamb- entombed in metal coffins, being injected with some sort of horrible substance, screaming as they did so, and those around them barely seemed to care. Scientists jotting down every sort of information they could gather, deformed bodies of failed experiments being thrown into furnaces, mutated forms being coldly executed just for failing some sort of scientific test.

They couldn't believe it, any of it. This is not things that were supposed to happen in times of peace, of times after war. How could anyone justify this? How could they even consider it?

Worst of all, how could they explain a picture of Cid smiling almost devilish in one picture as two successful experiments sparred in some sort of hidden facility? Was it Cid, the person who had been so kind to them for these past three years, the person who unknowingly brought Squall and Rinoa together, the person who was the closest thing most of them had to a father. Was it Cid that actually seemed to be happy with this Project GAIA that seemed so horrifying, they couldn't imagine even Ultimecia taking part in it?

Had they truly known Cid all those years and just now were learning the truth, the whole truth? The truth of who Cid really was?

The truth of what drove Ferin so mad…the truth of everything?

They just stared at the screen, their eyes white, their skins just as pale as a thousand ghosts. They couldn't believe it, after all these years they were beginning to learn things they never wanted to learn. And in the end, they just left. They said nothing else, did nothing else, and thought nothing else.

It was nine at night. A trail of bloody corpses of monsters littered the training ground, all downed by Squall and his gunblade. It wasn't necessarily hard for Rinoa to find Squall pounding a dead mutant into oblivion, still slicing away at something that had died by his gunblade long ago.

Squall didn't look behind him to look at her when his love approached, a protective spell glowing in her hand to protect in case a monster would leap at her at a moment's warning. "What do you want?" he scowled at her, to angry at himself to really care what the results of the response brought.

"I don't know anymore."

"He fucked us all up, didn't he?"

"Yeah, he really fucked us all up."

"What do we do about Ferin?"

"I don't care."

"I don't either. I really just wish right now that I was the one to send my weapon through Cid."

"Me too. Me too…"

"How could he do that?" Squall roared out, turning around to face Rinoa. "How could anyone do that? How could Cid -"

"Lie to us like that, time and time again? Treating us all loving and caring like, as if he was the greatest man in the world that no man cared about everyone as much as he did? And all the while, when we would turn away, he would have a damn fucking smirk on his face, laughing at us on the inside?"

"Yeah" Squall said softly. "How could he lie to us like that? Did Edea even know? Hell, I don't give a shit anymore!" Squall hollered as loud as he could, as loud as he wanted to, slashing away at the nearest tree he could see, and when that tree was just splinters, he just pounded on the ground until his hands were bleeding, and even then he pounded on the bloody earth, swearing and cursing Cid every time he did so.

And while he pounded more of his blood out of him, Rinoa just got on her knees and cried for what seemed like forever, for an eternity. Cid was the only dad she had ever known, that she would ever know, and now it turned out he was more of a monster than President Deling, the man who sent hundreds to death camps, the dictator of Galbadia the possessed Edea murdered to take control of the superpower. But not even he did anything as terrible as GAIA. Not even Ultimecia, out of as little as the SeeDs knew about her, did something as horrific as GAIA.

"I'm so scared" Rinoa cried out after letting her tears go down her face for so long. "I'm so scared Squall, so scared. I'm so scared." Rinoa just repeated the same phrase over and over, as if those were the only words she knew, as if those were the only words she could ever say, that she would ever say.

Squall never gave notice to her plead though. He just hit the ground harder and faster nearly every time she spoke, perhaps to get the words out of his mind. He didn't want to hear them: he didn't want to hear anything. He just wanted someone…anyone to tell him what he had to do, what he should do. He was so tired of being the leader, of being Commander Squall Leonhart. For once, he would just like to be called Squall, not Commander, not Sir, not Mr. Leonhart, just Squall.

The two confused lovers were still at the training facility when midnight came around, and then Squall finally stopped pounding the ground long enough to look at his bloody hands. He practically ripped open his entire palm, and it hurt him a whole lot, but it wasn't the physical pain that hurt him so.

"For once" he finally said to his tear stricken Rinoa, "I just want things to be normal. Just for once, just for one day, that's all I ask. No murders, no finding out horrible secrets beneath our noses. Normalcy – that's the only thing I want from anyone right now." Rinoa nodded in agreement, knowing all too well what her Knight meant. Ever since they first met, their relationship was anything but normal. First it was running from a superpower, then Rinoa got possessed by Ultimecia, then Rinoa became a sorceress and could become repossessed at any given moment. The moment Squall and Rinoa argued about stupid little things that every one not in love argued about, their relationship was anything but normal.

Their lives were anything but normal; Squall for as far back as he could of have remembered was a student at Balamb Garden to become part of one of the greatest military forces in the known world, and Rinoa was the only child of one of President Deling's grandest generals. Their lives had never been normal, and right now they feared that was not going to change any time soon.

If anything, it was going to get worse.