Winter has come too late
Too close beside me
Chapter 2: Winter
Seifer was cold. Not just any cold, but the farthest reaches of hell kind of cold. He couldn't remember how long he'd been walking, he only knew that it had been far too long. Snow and ice had worked their way under his very skin, and he was quite positive that his blood was starting to crystallize. He felt numb to the world, his brain hardly ticking along and his senses dulled.
Yet again, Seifer was moving. Life had turned him into a nomad, wandering the earth in search of that one place he could stop and stay in.
The end of time compression had found him back in Balamb, sitting in the company of his faithful posse. He was on the mend, and they both swore to help him. That, like so much else, was not quite meant to be. Not a soul in Balamb wanted him there, and it was impossible for him to get a job in a place where everyone felt he might murder them in their sleep. So, he left.
Moving on.
He went, for some incomprehensible reason, to Fisherman's Horizon. They were slightly more tolerant of his past than others, believing in second chances and always the ability to reform. They were the one place that didn't have capital punishment, which was certainly a plus at the very top of Seifer's list. Maritine had been there, still wandering around in his Galbadia Garden coat and bemoaning the fact that he had stumbled so severely and lost his job. He blamed this loss almost entirely upon Seifer.
No peace to be found.
Seifer moved again.
He'd walked along the railroad tracks to Esthar. The train going to and from Esthar was still not functioning, the tracks blocked off and the Great Salt Lake at the end of the line. Without flying in, Esthar was a remarkably difficult place to visit. He made his way through the salt flats, taking some time to crawl over the huge bones that littered the place. They were like a giant playground, filled with bizarre caves, slides, and ladders.
He stayed in Esthar for a while, jumping between odd jobs and cheap apartments.
Even at night, he reflected, Esthar crawled with activity. The neon and halogen lights never went out, always bathing the city in an unearthly glow. In the halo, there was always crowded activity. People prowling, people working, and people just looking for a place to be etched the story of their lives into the resin blue highways. He had never really adapted to wearing the floor length, pastel robes that everyone there seemed to like. They felt all too much like a dress, which Seifer would never lower himself to. The only bright side of their style was that his only distinguishing characteristic became his scar. Or...scars. He had so many now. Haunted, horrible, painful scars. They never went away.
Currently he was in Trabia, the land of nowhere and nothing. He looked around at the blanket of snow that covered the ground, only able to make out trees and hillsides. Everything had been green when he arrived with wildflowers blossoming and berry bushes ripe with their summer riches. Trabia had been full of promise then. But winter had stripped all of that away. And now, wandering aimlessly through the wilderness in search of another town and another job, he resented the circumstances that had driven him away from a normal life.
His toes wiggled inside his boots, numb from the cold that had seeped through them.
Another town, another day, and another life. He came up over a rise, weary and ready to stop. Employment was his real problem. Who wanted to hire one of the world's most infamous men? Apparently nobody did.
He was lucky in one respect. There was no real central government established in Trabia. No taxes. He could be self-sufficient. No demands were going to be made upon his simply existing.
He looked down into the valley over the town that laid nestled there. He'd been here before...what was it called?
Ekalaka. Right.
Shrugging his broad shoulders, he descended down into the little piece of suburbia.
Selphie looked over her shoulder at the two SeeDs set to go to Trabia. Selphie was one of Garden's only pilots, and she was in charge of coordinating flights and was the only person allowed to fly the Ragnarok -- currently the fastest mode of transportation outside of Esthar. They had, after all, built the Ragnarok (and several others like it) years ago. They were notoriously stingy about sharing their technology, so nothing since then had filtered out. All of the Garden officials were shocked when Esthar failed to ask for the return of their ship, and then refused once it was offered. The current theory as to why this had occurred was that they considered the technology to be already compromised. Indeed, engineers from all over the world were interested to get a look at it, hoping to replicate it for their own governments.
In the mean time, however, Ragnarok was Selphie's baby. She knew every inch of metal on it, from the shiny red hull to the smallest bolt.
And to think, she thought, that I used to think a train ride was ultimate rush.
A ride on a train was nothing in comparison to the high-flying, pulse throbbing power of the Ragnarok.
"Excited?" she asked the two SeeD's seated behind her. Clouds were racing by the cockpit windows as she turned to glance at them.
"Yeah...sure," one of them shrugged. Darshan Zinnovy, martial arts specialists, had a number of weapons in his arsenal. All of these were attached at various places along his body. A short sword rested against his back (short enough, at least, so that he could sit while wearing it). Along his belt were a number of little bags containing God knows what. Selphie had heard all sorts of rumors about him -- that he was into developing new poisons and would attack from long range with them by tipping all of his darts, that he practiced dark forms of magic and cursed all of his weapons so no one else would be able to use them. Selphie had no idea how many of the rumors were true, but she wasn't inclined to ask him about them.
"That didn't sound very excited," she pointed out.
"Running off to Trabia to kill one monster isn't exactly the thrill of a lifetime," Darshan replied.
"I think it sounds like fun," the other SeeD added in. Her name was Bella Cevario, a somewhat unlikely companion to Darshan Zinnovy. She was petite and looked like a porcelain doll next to the burly Zinnovy, even though Bella had a good inch on Selphie. Bella was a heavy magic user, not strong enough to use many weapons efficiently. However, her magic skills were nearly unparalleled among SeeDs of her rank. An impressive young woman who Quistis was unusually friendly with. She was, Selphie realized, a lot like Quistis in many respects.
They had the same golden blonde hair and blue eyes. Bella was smaller and (if it was possible) more feminine. But they both had the same drive to achieve that had marked Quistis as a prodigy years ago.
Selphie grinned at her. "That's more like it!" She pumped a hand into the air.
"Where are we being dropped off at?" Bella asked. "You can't land in the mountains, can you?"
"Well, yes and no," Selphie replied. "I can land in the mountains if there's a space big enough. White Pine doesn't have that, so we're going to land in a nearby town that's much bigger and has an airport."
"An airport in Trabia?" Darshan growled. "You must be joking."
"Nope," Selphie replied, her mood as springy as ever despite Zinnovy's various attempts to flatten it. He forgot that she'd spent a very long time in the company of Squall, the ultimate mood cruncher. "It's about 30 some miles east of White Pine. I already called ahead to clear our landing...a place called Ekalaka."
"Ee-kuh-laa-kuh," Bella said the name slowly. "Interesting name."
Darshan rolled his eyes.
"Quistis told me that there would be an EPD detective there to meet you," Selphie informed them. "A man named Patrick Lee. He's the one who is named in the contract, so you'll be following his orders. He apparently has some specifics on the monster you're going to be after."
"Trabia's a no man's land," Darshan shook his head. "Finding a specific monster there is like finding a needle in a haystack."
"Then it should be a nice challenging mission," Selphie grinned, probably a little more broadly than was necessary. She felt bad for Bella that she had to work with the very unenthusiastic Darshan. She knew the feeling first hand. Although, Bella didn't seem particularly disturbed by her partner and her lips were curved slightly upward in a low smile.
Selphie tapped one of the on board displays.
"We should be getting there soon," she announced. "Are you buckled in? We're probably going to run into a couple bumps on the way in."
Seifer, along with almost every other resident of Ekalaka, looked up toward the sky as the giant red dragon that was the Ragnarok came in for a landing. It left a hot streak across the sky in it's wake, all of the air behind it expanding greatly and then condensing and forming watery droplets that made the sky seem to ripple. It was an effect that was both intimidating and fascinating. He wondered distantly if Esthar had designed it that way, or if it was just a by product of the way the machine needed to fly.
Watching it's long, clawed feet extend out to catch the ground and hold it in place, he couldn't help but remember watching it come at Lunatic Pandora through Utimecia's second sight. She was always crawling around somewhere inside of him then, like an inflamed organ you needed to get rid of but felt an odd sort of attachment to. She was his heart and his mind, and after a time, she was his sight and senses as well. She was everything.
He shook his head, driving the memories away.
He still dreamed of her at night, unable to ever banish all of the remnants of her from his system. He had been taken over so completely, and she had changed him forever. There was no going back.
"What is that?" someone standing nearby breathed, unaware Seifer was close enough to hear.
"That," he replied, "is SeeD."
The man swung around to look at him, his eyes narrowed. There were only a few reasons that anyone would recognize the often invisible force that was Garden and it's elite forces -- you were either being followed by them or were one of them. In Seifer's case, both of those conditions were in some sense applicable. He didn't feel like explaining his special circumstances to the man, however, and began his advance toward the airport, curious as to who would be landing in remote Trabia and why.
They could make his life exponentially more difficult if they were planning to stick around in Ekalaka. Enough of the people in town already knew that he was a war criminal, he didn't need soldiers hanging around to remind them. On top of that, he didn't want SeeDs tailing him everywhere he went. He wasn't charged with anything, and they had no right to persecute him for anything he'd done. All he was trying to do was live his life.
A latent anger began to boil up inside of him.
It would just figure if they were here for me.
He walked steadily toward the now still form of Ragnarok. The points of it's wings stuck up above the top of the bank like little horns, even though the airport laid quite a ways beyond. One of the biggest aircraft in the world. He'd heard that statistic somewhere, although he was quite positive that it couldn't be true.
His feet thumped against the pavement as he came around the bank and started down 7th Street.
The airport itself had no buildings to speak of. An urbanized person wouldn't even have called it an airport. It was, in fact, an empty field that had been flattened into a narrow strip long enough for small passenger planes to land in. There was a large wooden fence that separated it from a nearby road that lead into town, and the only tracks in the field had long ago grown over.
Ragnarok's formidable claws had given the Ekalaka airport a brand new scar to cover up, and as he came up to the fence the hatch popped open and a sprightly girl came bouncing out.
The messenger girl. Hyne, what was her name again? Selphie. Still wearing the silly yellow sun dress. She looked like a giant, awkward daffodil in amongst the grass.
"I sure hope this is the airport," she chirped, looking around.
"Maybe they should put up a sign or something," replied a flash of blonde.
Seifer's stomach knotted violently. Blonde. He knew that color. Hyne, he dreamed of that color. Quistis, his old instructor, the only one who had fought against him that he never dreamed would be there. Squall was a natural pick, but Quistis had shocked him. She was talk, not action. On top of that, she was an instructor and was never really in the field. He still didn't know why she'd been there, what sort of circumstances had led to her presence in the mission. That day in the detention room, before he'd left for Timber, she hadn't bothered to say a word to him.
Now, she was here...flying back into his life. He couldn't breathe. God, he was going to hyperventilate and die.
He tried to steady himself and closed his eyes.
When he dared open them again, he peeked over the fence for a good look at his old...friend. He wasn't entirely sure he could ever call her that. But he'd come to like to think that maybe she, out of all of them, would be the most likely to take him back. She'd never really hate him. At least, he didn't think so. And she was so damn logical, she more than anybody would see reason. So he liked to believe.
His eyes flashed open once again, prepared to take in her sudden appearance. That blonde hair...perfect skin...lanky frame. Something in his head ticked, pushing him backwards, causing him to stumble into and knock over all of assumptions. He dropped back quickly from the fence.
That's not her.
He gasped.
It wasn't Quistis. It was some other blonde haired SeeD. He had to stop for a moment and catch his breath. Grating back over all over his thoughts about her to his real reason for coming to get a look at the Ragnarok.
Why are they here?
He ducked to make sure he wasn't visible over the fence, listening to their shouts over the idling engines.
"Good luck!" Selphie yelled. "Remember to check in from time to time with progress reports. And your contact again is Patrick Lee."
Patrick Lee and progress reports. They weren't on vacation, that was for sure. But what sort of mission could there be in Ekalaka? Or anywhere else in the area for that matter? He ran a hand through his hair.
White Pine.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a blue and red knit hat and pulled it over his head. He was still cold from his long journey and his muscles were shuddering under his clothing. He needed to get inside and he needed to think. He scratched his chin, aware of the shadow of a beard that had grown there and the fact that he couldn't quite feel his finger's ministrations.
Looking back over his shoulder, he started back into Ekalaka, doing his best to look casual. The Ragnarok fired all engines, a roar among the silence. Disruption, it seemed to break all the air around it. Nothing thumped or bumped in Trabia -- it shattered.
He disappeared into the familiar streets, intending to find out why SeeD was invading his territory.