A/N: This is a relatively uneventful chapter...but the next one will have a lot more dialogue and (what you're probably waiting for) the meeting of Seifer and Quistis.

For a moment I stray
then it holds me completely
Close to home, I cannot say
Close to home, feeling so far away

Chapter 10: Close to Home

Seifer tucked his head down, hoping nobody would recognize him, as he hurried back down the cobalt Balamb sidewalk toward the harbor. His heart was pounding hard and his head was spinning. An odd feeling in the pit of his stomach drove him forward and he fought the urge to turn around and look back at the woman he'd been so excited to see. He hadn't really expected her to be there, sprinting across the street toward him with her hair down and flowing. It had been so long since he'd seen her, but she hadn't changed at all. If anything, she looked younger than he remembered. She didn't have the hard and firm look he'd been accustomed to. Not even the one she had once had when she'd been in the midst of SeeD training with her whip curled at her side. Back then she had been a soldier, a military instructor. But now she'd lost that...or maybe he'd lost the ability to see it. He wasn't sure which.

Forking a hand through his hair, he looked up at a flock of gulls that was flying over. They landed nearby on the dock, harassing a man who was sitting trying to eat a hamburger. Leaning back in his bench, he flailed a hand at them, and the white birds pressed him further, sensing the man's unease. Seifer had been there before, and he felt a pang of pity for the man.

He didn't feel quite as he expected. And, really, Seifer wasn't entirely positive how he felt. There was some confusion, mixed emotions of what he was attempting to inject into the situation and what was really going on. Balamb was home, and with as long as he had been dreaming about going back to the sunny beaches and salty air, he was shocked at how it failed to soothe his nerves. He still felt raw, still felt the deep sense of heavy foreboding that followed him around like a plague. And most importantly, he still felt her hanging over him. The one presence in his life that wouldn't go away, that effigy from hell with black wings and tiger stripes -- corruption.

Doubt clouded over him, and he paused for a moment to turn around and look in the direction he'd seen Quistis. Why her? He wasn't really sure of that anymore either. Back in Trabia she had been...he searched his mind. She'd been a link to the past. She was what he once had. She was...Seifer cringed. Love. Was that what he'd been about to think? Was she love? Was he in love with her?

Stumbling to a stop, he flopped down onto a bench that faced out to sea. It was such a stark change in contrast to Trabia that for long moments he fought the feeling that he was dreaming. Really, in retrospect, he supposed it should have been obvious that he'd end up in Balamb when he got on that ship. It was a hop and a skip across the water and a huge port town. Of course the ship was going to Balamb. But he hadn't considered it.

Looking out from under his long and knotted hair at the peacefulness around him, Seifer felt a sudden crushing fear. The breath left his body and he struggled to get it back.

It will happen here, too.

He watched a little boy break off from his mother and race across the sand at a group of gulls that were picking at an old sack, sending them screaming into the heavens. Seifer hesitantly imagined for a moment what would happen if he were to loose control again in such a small place as Balamb. A place he loved. Home.

Oh God. His stomach lurched. I've got to get out of here.

He knew it was there, lurking below the surface. And he knew that it was beyond his control. Seifer shuddered to think that he again would be the one to bring blood and fear to Balamb.

***

Quistis was dreaming. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew it was a dream because she couldn't quite feel the chill of the biting wind that was blowing against her face. She could feel the strength of it, the way it sucked the air out of her lungs and pushed against her chest so she couldn't take another without drowning. But she didn't feel the stinging cold that she knew should have been assaulting her cheeks. But that feel of incongruence was almost fully washed out by an emotional surge that came up to swamp her as she looked down at her small black shoes and stockings.

She was sitting a folding chair, the tinny seat of which was hard and cold against her bottom. Pushing her hands against the seat, she attempted to lift herself slightly off of it and shifted slightly to the side.

"Stop it!" A dark voice intruded on her uncomfort. She turned and looked up into a hostile, bearded face that was staring down at her with raw hazel eyes. There was a vein in his neck that burrowed up into his scruffy hair, wiggling along like a worm underneath his skin. It throbbed perceptibly and turned an unhealthy shade of purple, his muscles bunching all around it. "That woman took you in and loved you! Show some respect!" he yelled scathingly, although none of the other people around seemed to notice.

Admonished, Quistis sat back and folded her hands in her lap like the woman on the other side of her was doing.

In front of her, a man in black paced. He held a large, tattered book in his hand and was reading calmly from it, a sort of halo glowing around him as he marched on through his words. They carried on and above the wind, separating Quistis from her angry father for the moments in which the man was speaking. Taking in only a few key terms (things like "rest" and "tragic"), she looked forward at the rising mountain of wood directly behind the man in black.

She wasn't naive enough not to know what was in it. She wasn't so innocent she didn't know what it meant, and what the man in black was speaking about. She heard the comforting words of peace from him, of moving on and finding wholeness once the world has been ripped away, and of finding a better place, a rest and freedom from life. But she didn't feel any of that. As she looked at the casket, polished so that she could see herself in it around the green strap that was anchoring a group of shuddering, white lilies to the top of it, she felt her father shuddering with his grief and felt hopeless fear tighten around her heart.

Quistis closed her eyes. She still remembered the day she had been adopted, and the comfort that she had found with the bright, blonde woman who had taken her by hand away from the only home she had ever known. Matron had told her that it would be a good home, that she would have a real family and parents who loved her. Matron loved her...but that, she figured, wasn't the same. And as she rode in the car at the side of her new mother, chewing on a large wad of bubblegum that they'd gotten after eating lunch together on the way home, she felt a little of what Matron had meant. This was different. There weren't any other children trying to get her attention...it was all Quistis, and she liked that.

But in the here and now, years later and worlds away from the orphanage, she sat watching the mother she'd discovered being lowered slowly into the ground. Quistis hadn't been permitted to see her body, and so could only imagine the woman inside. And in the days that had passed since her sudden death, Quistis had moved from a feeling of confused and desperate grief into horror and foreboding.

Swallowing, she looked up at her father. His hair was disheveled, his whole appearance raw. The loss had been hard on him. Quistis knew it had because she could hear him crying at night in the next room. And she had been sitting at the table coloring when the phone call had come, and watched when after saying a muted "thank you" and dropping the phone from his ear, he'd growled like a bear and ripped the phone off the wall, throwing it in a fit against the table and causing Quistis' box of crayons to fly across kitchen. Since that moment, he had transformed into a different man. He'd never been loving toward Quistis, and she'd always gotten the impression that he wasn't particularly interested in her, but he'd tolerated her for the sake of his wife. And now that she was gone...

Quistis didn't want to stay with him. She saw the stark hatred in his eyes when he looked at her, but she didn't understand why. She was afraid of him, grieved for her mother, and looked at life without the luster it once had.

Following suit, she stood up with him and walked to the deep, rectangular hole in the ground. He bent down and gripped a clump of dirt in his hand, then dissolving into tears dropped it on top of the coffin and collapsed into a tortured heap, then was led away by the woman who had been sitting on Quistis' other side, leaving her standing beside the yawning void of her mother's grave, alone and afraid.

Jerking away from the feeling, from the horror and the terror, Quistis suddenly awoke and stared bleary eyed at the ceiling for a moment before realizing where she was and putting the whole sequence together as a dream. Laying like a dead weight, she felt the pain still humming deep down inside. She had never told anyone what had happened to her in her adopted home, only hinted that things hadn't gone well, and the secret festered inside of her at night.

Rubbing her face with her hands, she tried to push the feelings away.

She hadn't known until right up before leaving for Garden that her father blamed her for her mother's death. Or that seeing Quistis every day only brought back the painful memories for him. All the verbal abuse, and the hatred he had shown toward her marked their relationship as the most painful of Quistis' short life. She felt no remorse over the fact that her mother had been shot during a store robbery while going out to buy a sick Quistis fever reducers one evening. It was regrettable, tragic, and sad, but not Quistis' fault. But she did feel tremendous regret that she had never been able to earn the love of her father, and that in the end she represented to him every evil in the world.

Rolling over onto her side, Quistis pulled the blankets up around her, remembering the suspicion and the thinly veiled threats.

"You good for nothing, little Bitch!" She hadn't cleaned her room, or made her bed.

The slap that stung against her cheek that made her lip bleed.

"God dammit, how fucking stupid are you?" She fell down, skinned her knee, and got blood on the carpet.

Worthless, stupid...guilty. His accusations echoed in her head as they always had. The ironic driving force behind her excellence, feeding her irrepressible need to make something of herself, but always look back on it and see herself as the useless, dumb little girl who had unwittingly put the gun to her mother's head.

Bothered, she pushed the sheets off and got out of bed. In a daze, she pulled on a pair of blue track pants, shoes, and pulled a jacket on over the white tank top she had worn to bed. Grabbing a black hair-band off her dresser, she grabbed her keycard, shoved it into her jacket pocket, and stepped out of her stifling room into the slightly more airy Balamb Garden hallway. The sound of water filtering through the numerous pools and fountains that existed inside Garden was comforting, and as she walked she practiced deep breathing and pulled her hair up into a high ponytail.

Trying to sleep for the rest of the night, she knew, was a futile task. The same dream had haunted her since childhood, and she'd never been able to recover a night from it. So, as she had become accustomed to doing, she strode purposefully toward the front gate, ready to take a long contemplative walk. Occasionally, she would go to the training center, but she felt too out of wack to take on monsters and wanted to get outside into the fresh air. Her lungs felt like they were about to collapse in on her.

"Good evening, Miss Trepe." The guard at the door smiled at her, and stuck out his hand for her keycard. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked.

"Not really," she shrugged non-committally, not wanting to talk to him about her personal problems. "Just going for a walk."

He slipped her card through a slot near the gates and waited a moment before it beeped, confirming her authorization to come and go as she pleased.

"Have a nice walk." He handed the card back to her.

The air outside was fresh from late December rain, and with a sense of relief she drank it in. Pulling her jacket tighter around her, and shoving her hands into it's lined pockets, she took off across the street and into the grass that led toward the woods and the beach. The latter was her destination, but there was a draw that the trees held, too. And when she found the well beaten path through them, she ducked into their shadows. Students had been traveling directly through the little crop of trees to get to the beach since Garden had begun, and the path was beaten stiff and bare. It was easy to follow, even at night.

She didn't understand why thinking about her father still bothered her so much. Eventually, she'd come to Garden to escape him, and he'd been more than okay with her sudden career choice. It seemed that he thought she was particularly suited to mercenary work (after all, she already had one hit to her record) and it was somewhat to Quistis' own chagrin that he'd been right. But she had moved on past that, she liked to think, to become a bright and successful woman. She was the lieutenant commander of one of the most powerful forces on the planet. She handled all manner of events in a calm and collected manner. She had her own office, was friendly with a number of world leaders. She'd saved life as mankind knew it.

So why did one man's contempt still keep her up at night?

She hated that the doubt was still there, in all manner of forms.

She didn't usually go out of way to do things like ask guys out or anything that might alter her routine. In the monotony, she found control, and in the loneliness she found the ability to rationalize her status as choice rather than fear. She said nothing to Brett, whom she saw every week and was on friendly terms with, because if he rejected her it would confirm everything her father had said about her, and it would disrupt her control. She'd be lost, and so it was just easier not to have a life.

As she stepped out of the trees and saw the long stretch of gleaming beach stretch out in front of her, her thoughts momentarily derailed and went another, unexpected direction. Bella Cevario would arrive back in Balamb in the morning, where she would then be put under Dr. Kadawaki's care. Quistis had been warned that Bella probably wouldn't be a reliable source of information for at least a few days. With the major surgery on her jaw, and the sudden loss of her partner, Dr. Kadawaki planned to keep Bella from being disturbed as much as possible, which precluded a full fledged inquiry into exactly what had gone wrong.

Her thoughts traveled to Seifer, who it appeared Bella had been in contact with in Trabia. Was he the one who'd broken her jaw? It seemed likely. Quistis couldn't fathom how or why he'd been involved, but didn't doubt that he somehow was. He had a tendency to draw trouble like a magnet. Wherever something untoward was going on, Seifer would inevitably pop up. He'd always been that way.

At least this time, she thought, he isn't the one killing everyone.

Pain in the neck, Seifer was. But great, furry beast he was not. And despite his unfortunate appearance, she couldn't pin it on him.

Setting herself comfortably on the beach, she stared out to sea and wondered where they were -- the two men in her family who both strived to smother her. There wasn't that much difference between them, really, except maybe that once upon a time Seifer had actually loved her in that odd, big brother method of torment that he had. But surviving his contrived torment, experiencing it together, had been what drew them together as startlingly like-minded children. And if she'd listened to him so long ago, life as she knew it could have been irrevocably changed.

Don't leave, Quisty. Those people don't really want you.