Just to Breathe
~Fujin's Story~
Chapter Ten
Evil Eyes
"She thinks, we look at each
other, wondering what the other is thinking, but we never say a thing, and
these crimes between us grow deeper." –DMB; "Ants Marching"
In the early light of morning I was visited by a young woman, dressed in what I learned was a SeeD uniform, who identified herself with the name of Xu. "I'm here to fit you into a uniform," she explained, and I realized that I had worn nothing other than my infirmary shift for an entire week. I suddenly felt dirty and disgusted with myself. After she took my measurements, she showed me to a shower in the back of the infirmary. As I washed myself I imagined my passed being scrubbed away with the dirt and grime. It slid off of my body, mixed with the water, and disappeared down the drain. I was happy to see it go.
Xu returned shortly after I'd dried myself and presented me with a navy Garden uniform. The material was soft, and I first ran my hands over the fabric, and then traced the silver design with my fingertips. I slipped the uniform on my slim body, and turned to a mirror. From the neck down, I thought, I looked pretty official. The image was completed with a pair of mid-shin, steel-toed, combat-style boots, which I liked the best of the entire uniform. Slipping the eye patch back over my eye, I grinned satisfactorily.
With Xu leading me out of the infirmary, I got my first good look at Balamb Garden's interior. The grand structure climbed upwards three stories, Xu explained. "Headmaster Cid's office is located on the third floor, and most of the classrooms are located on the second. On this floor are the dorms, parking garage, training center, library, infirmary, quad, and cafeteria. There's a directory in the southern hall, if you get lost." And there were also signs, I noted, as we passed the cafeteria.
"You'll be rooming with my old roommate. When you pass your SeeD test, you get to move into a dormitory single. She's a little bossy, but I think you'll like her when you meet her." Stopping at a chrome door in one of the first halls, Xu buzzed the door. Only a few seconds passed before the door opened, and a thin blonde peaked her head out. "Oh, hey Xu…What's going on?"
"This is Fujin," Xu motioned to me. "She's going to be your new roommate."
The girl noticed me, then, raising her eyebrow curiously. Xu gave me a little push towards the room. "Don't worry, you'll settle in soon enough," she examined the face of her watch, "I have a strategy meeting in a few minutes, so I've got to get out of here. Do you think you two can manage?"
"Don't worry, I've got everything under control," the girl offered some sort of salute, and Xu returned the motion before waving her goodbye and skittering off down the hall. "Well, come in, I guess." The blonde girl moved aside, opening the door wider. It was a bigger room than the infirmary, furnished lightly with interesting looking furniture. I looked around in awe. "You're awfully quiet," the girl claimed.
"Sorry," I responded, loosely. "What's your…name?" I questioned, pouring all of my energy into concentration on the words.
"Quistis," she sat down on one of the beds, folding her long legs up beneath herself. "Quistis Trepe. I've been at Garden for three years. My instructors say I'm very intelligent, and that I could pass my SeeD test any time. Unfortunately, they have a rule, which requires you to be fifteen before you can take it. How old are you?"
"Thirteen," I answered, sitting down on the other bed, impressed when I sank into the cushions. I could feel her watching me intensely as I nervously admired the room.
"If you don't mind my asking," she bit her bottom lip, blinking a few times, "What happened to your eye? And your hair?"
My heart sank, realizing that my face would be the first thing people would always notice. "Accident," I explained. "T-Rexaur."
She raised her finely shaped brows over her crystal blue eyes, shocked, yet almost unbelieving. "You fought a T-Rexaur? Why?"
"Attacked me." I finalized, turning my head sharply away from her burning eyes. An awkward silence followed, until Quistis stood and crossed to the door of the room, "Class starts in a little bit, are you coming?"
Noiselessly I nodded, and followed her out into a school full of evil eyes.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"Isn't that the new girl…?"
"What's wrong with her skin?"
"She's weird…"
"What happened to her eye?"
"I heard she killed a man!"
"Freak!"
While I excelled in most of my classes at Garden, the important things I learned were lessons in life. Ignorance is bliss. I stuck close to my posse in the first few months, so much that I was hardly ever seen without them. No one bothered us; we were seen as the "tough kids" on campus. It wasn't until I started to venture out on my own, to the library to find a good book, or to the training center to practice, that I started hearing the whispers and rumors. Some said I had lost my eye in a car accident, when I lost my parents. Others said that a man gouged it out when he tried to kill me, but had some how I managed to kill him first. Neither rumor was true, of course.
I also discovered new emotions. Living with Mother, I had only instinct, a drive to survive. Every moment had been a struggle. I never knew what would happen to me, there was no sense of safety knowing that I might be killed the next morning. When I ran away, and had no one other than Raijin, and later, Seifer, I learned a desire for acceptance, which was more of a compensation for my days with mother. In my posse, my sense of love and belongingness became, for the most part, fulfilled. But here, in Balamb Garden, I found my self-esteem level to be constantly shot down.
Quistis and I hardly spoke. I caught her staring at me often enough, and I couldn't help but imagine her thinking to herself how weird I was. I learned about jealousy. Watching Quistis every morning from my bed as she combed her blonde hair and put make up on her perfectly creamy skin, I felt only shame for myself. I was nothing like Quistis. I was ugly.
I met the infamous Zell Dincht two days after my initiation into the world that was Balamb Garden. Raijin and I were seated in the cafeteria, waiting for the ever-elusive Seifer to appear, when the spiky-haired blonde rushed in, just barely avoiding a head on collision with another student as he rocketed to the lunch line.
"Rush, why?" I had asked Raijin. Back then I had kept to my quiet ways.
"He wants a hot dog, ya know? They sell pretty quick, ya know? I bet he doesn't get one."
Sure enough, the energetic boy was turned away, hot dog free. He snapped his fingers, and as he sulked away, passed by our table. Raijin chirped with amusement, "Gotta get here quicker, ya know?"
Zell's head turned with slight irritation towards us, and I examined the black tattoo carved around his eye. "What? Oh, hey Raijin. If you were anyone else, I'd have to get pissed off that you made fun of me."
Raijin snorted a humble laugh before he waved a hand in my direction. "This is my friend Fujin, ya know? Just started classes here, ya know?"
Zell's blue eyes focused on me for a long, quiet moment. Sitting uncomfortably in the cold, metal chair, I searched my brain for something to say. Raijin rescued me, "Nice tattoo, ya know?"
As his gaze fell away from my face, he instantly puffed up with pride. "I just got it done last week. Ma's not too fond of it, but she'll get used to it. I think it makes me look wicked cool!"
I could see his mother, in my mind's gallery, as both anger and pride skittered across her face; her little boy was growing up. "Hurt?" I questioned of the tattoo.
"Felt like I was getting beaten senseless in the face by thousands of needles," he dramatized. "But I'm good with pain."
I wondered if someone like my Mother had ever beaten him senseless, knowing for certain that it wasn't his own Ma.
Seifer didn't get a long with Zell at all, as I soon found out. Nor did he get a long with most of the Garden students. He berated Zell, teased Quistis, and most of all, he insulted Squall Leonhart.
It wasn't until a few months after I'd arrived unceremoniously at Garden that I met Squall, myself. I'd heard the myths and rumors; I'd listened to Seifer's stories and Raijin's back ups. But when I tested out of Introduction to Battle Combat into a more advanced level, I was given a desk next to his. He never said a single word to me; he never looked at me. In fact, he said little to anyone, and looked up only when someone spoke to him. Even then, his responses varied little from his typical "Whatever." It wasn't my choice that I had to get to know him.
When our instructor assigned us as partners on a combat observation test, I wasn't sure if I should be annoyed or thankful. Sure, Seifer had put a pretty good opinion of him in my head, but he was silent, like me, as well as a supreme fighter.
We made a terrible team.
On the day of the exam, I arrived at class in uniform (as it was optional, but customary, for students to do so), and had to wait fifteen minutes for Squall to show up. He just barely made it before it was our turn to run the course in the Training Center. It wasn't that our fighting skills were poor, or that we didn't quite make the time limit that our scores were knocked down. No, it was "poor communication skills" that burned the top of our grading rubrics in fierce, red ink. He glanced at his marks, shrugged his shoulders, and walked wordlessly away. It irritated me, for he was just as the others had said: reformed, arrogant, and full of himself.
Regardless, I had a secret admiration for the silent warrior.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The days melted into weeks, the weeks dissolved into months, the months grew into a year, and then two. I was nearly fifteen, and on the road to becoming a prominent SeeD candidate. There were heaps of prerequisites to complete before the option was made available to me, yet I was determined to make it. To prove myself, to my posse, to cocky Zell Dincht, to snobby Quistis Trepe, to arrogant Squall Leonhart, and to the rest of Balamb Garden's ignorant students.
Over the two years of my residence at the school, I had earned myself a reputation of being a fierce, angry, one-word-shouting bitch, though I suppose it was really just a shell. My quiet, short-sentence usual had evolved into a barking burst of words. It was a decent way to silence the whispers that floated around me, which, even with my attempts to stop them, never completely went away. People were cruel.
There were sever pre-tests that lead up to the written exam that would qualify candidates for the field test that would make them SeeDs. Quistis, Raijin, Seifer, and I were all competing for a place on one of the field squads. Quistis would stay up late at night, devouring the words of her textbooks like a pile of the cafeteria's hot dogs (not that she would ever do such a thing). Never once did she offer to study with me, nor did I ask her to. In fact, I think she was dead set on scoring higher than me. Seifer, as always, had hardly studied. Knowledge came naturally to him, and it was a quality that I admired.
Raijin had studied with me quite a few times, but he was so dense that little stuck to him. We made it a game as we sparred, for me to shout out questions for him to answer, and vise versa. If he missed, I would deliver him a good kick in the shin (an action that almost became sisterly over the years). If I missed, he would draw magic from me, forcing me to have to draw it back before I could attack him again. I found that Raijin remembered better when I kicked him hard.
It just so happened that one of the pre-tests was to be held the day of my fifteenth birthday. It was to be a rather large test, and I couldn't seem to remember some of the names of the famous sorceresses of the past, no matter how hard I tried. Seifer and Raijin had gone to Balamb for the evening (a privilege open to all students on Friday nights), and I was left to cram alone in my room. Even Quistis had gone out, certain of her own history skills. I sighed as I skimmed pages of my book. Sorceress Adel: tyrannous ruler of Esthar. The text was so vague… it was bookish of me, but I wanted to know more about her. Smiling to myself, I slipped out of my dorm into the halls.
It was quiet, most of the students having flocked to Balamb for an evening on the town. I preferred the halls to be empty. I listened to my boots echo as I walked. Tap, tap, tap, tap…I looked up through the skylights at the stars. Somewhere out there, I thought, Mother may or may not be living. I wondered if she even remembered me.
The library was mostly vacant, and even the desk girl had quit her job early. I ambled my way over to the history section in the back, scanning the book spines for any telltale clues. It was then that I heard the soft gasp behind me.
My heart sank, annoyed that I might have to defend myself from yet another's verbal barbs. Yet when I turned around, I was surprised that the small-framed brunette looked perfectly comfortable looking at me. "I'm sorry, I thought I was alone in the room," she smiled. "I hope I didn't frighten you."
I shook my head, partially taken aback by her friendly attitude. "FINE."
"My name's Ellone," she informed me. "What's yours?"
"FUJIN."
I found it odd that she seemed so interested in me, though I had never seen her around the school before. She asked, "What are you doing in the Library so late on a Friday night?"
I raised the book I had selected mindlessly in explanation, "STUDYING," I barked, hardly meaning to sound quite so harsh.
"Oh," raising an eyebrow, she questioned, "What are you studying."
"HIS…History," I actually had to fight to soften my usual tone. "Adel."
"Adel?" at this, she sounded slightly startled, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Why Adel?"
"History test." I shrugged, giving the simplest answer I knew.
"Adel was a tyrant. She cared little about her people and was power-hungry."
I raised an eyebrow, and pulled up a chair next to her, interested in what she had to say. She went on, "She worked her people mindlessly, caring little for their needs. Fortunately for the people of Esthar, a great man came along and rescued them. Adel's body was sealed into an anti-magic capsule created by a scientist by the name of Odine. The lock was then launched into space, and is being watched carefully by the citizens of Esthar. Does that help at all?"
Frankly, I was impressed. Not only had Ellone been nice to me, but also she had a vast amount of knowledge about something I didn't. "Yes…Thank…you." I tried on a smile, but if felt shaky on my lips. It was an action I didn't practice often.
I made a friend that night, staying up late in order to chat with Ellone. I returned to my dorm only when the Garden Faculty came and asked Ellone and I to leave. She walked with me most of the way.
Quistis was already asleep when I quietly slipped into the room, her clothes folded neatly over a desk chair. I changed quickly and then slipped beneath the thick blankets of my bed before the chilly night air could touch me. Glancing again out the window, I admired the stars as I remembered my first few nights at Garden. I had been so uncomfortable with the sinking mattress that I had taken my pillow and curled up on the floor. It was one of the reasons that Quistis had thought I was weird. Over time I had grown used to the softness, and now I could hardly imagine what it felt like to lie in the basement of Mother's cold house. I drifted to sleep on that thought, and when mother came to chase me, Seifer, Raijin, Ellone and I fought her down.
It was a beautiful dream.
[End Chapter Ten]
Authoress's note: I would have probably had this chapter out yesterday, except I was indulging too much in my birthday celebrations! Sorry! Also, in the future I will be staying in Japan for a week and a half, and will not have access to update until I get back. I'm hoping to post another chapter before then, but I'm not sure if I will get around to it! I'll try!
I'm sorry for the lack of goodness in this chapter. I sort of struggled with it when I realized that I had separated most of the exciting points of the story into chapter nine when I split that chapter. Again, thank you everyone who read this and especially thank you to all of those that reviewed, including Chaos, Al Kristopher, Ametenshi, Tikiru, and Platinum Angel for reviewing the last chapter!
