4. Friend

WHAT WOULD I do without Quistis Trepe? I ask myself that frequently. At so many points in my life, she's had my back—standing up to Seifer at the orphanage, helping me study for exams, fighting by my side in the war, working as colleagues back in Balamb. She was the first person I called after Harper was born, and when Rinoa and I broke up, she would check in, leave take-out at my door, make sure I was still alive.

It almost doesn't make sense. There were so many times when I didn't deserve this kind of friendship, this level of loyalty. The time I told her to talk to a wall, or the time I got angry after she called me out over my ever-increasing drug use. There were times when I didn't want her or anyone else to see me, where all I wanted was to just roll over, like a plane inverting and falling out of a perfect and empty blue sky. And she could've listened, of course, but instead she stayed, helped me crash land, tried to make the impact minimal.

It's probably one of the reasons I don't complain when she shows up unannounced. Her arrival breaks up an otherwise lazy Sunday with Harper—a 10:00 drop-in punctuated by a courtesy ring of the doorbell as she invites herself inside.

I'm a little embarrassed. Dirty hair, unshowered, still in the sweats I slept in (it's not my best look, not that it's anything new to Quistis—she's seen me just as bad or worse on several occasions). But Harper's thrilled; she abandons her cartoons and near-empty cereal bowl, running up to her with an enthusiastic peal.

"Aunt Quisty!"

"Hi, Harper," she says as she reaches down to give her a hug. "Tell Dad it's time to get off his butt. We're going for coffee."

Harper smiles, nods, and runs back to me, happily chanting, "Dad, get off your butt! Dad, get off your butt!"

I roll my eyes, but of course I still obey; I'm a SeeD, after all, and as far as I'm concerned, Harper's been my commanding officer since she could talk. She's just like her mother that way. There's no hesitation about taking charge, no second thought about saying exactly what she wants. I get up from the couch and smooth my t-shirt in a vain attempt to straighten myself out.

Quistis has this half-grin as she crosses her arms and observes me. It doesn't help that she's always put together, almost like some model out of a catalogue even when she's dressed casually: her wool cocoon coat, her tailored jeans—hell, that sweater that probably set her back 500G. In every way, she's my exact antithesis, and I almost want to apologize, but I bite my tongue. I remind myself that she's the one who decided to show up; she can check her expectations.

"Slow morning?"

I throw my arms out. She may as well get the full (shitty) show. "What do you think?"

She laughs. "Well, get ready. We're going out."

There's an echo of an order from an instructor to her student. Part of me is tempted to ask her if she wants to make a trip to visit the secret area back at Garden, too, but instead, I look down to Harper with a shrug. "What do you think Harps? Should we get out of the house?"

Her reply is emphatic: "Yes!"

I tell Harper to change and excuse myself to get cleaned up. There's a small voice in my head saying I'd rather stay on the couch and continue on with the nothingness as I make quick work of showering. I get this feeling sometimes, heavy as a brick; it strikes at random, treads on my mind, saps my energy. I'm sure it stems from losing Rinoa, which is kind of pathetic almost four years on, but I just get these days where I can't bring myself to do anything but stare at the TV or scroll through my phone or try to force my way through some banal make-work project.

At least the logical side of me knows this is good, I'm here, I'm up, I'm being a dad, I'm getting out (two days in a row, no less; I should get some sort of medal). I dress myself in something more presentable than slept-in sweatpants, dry my hair, brush my teeth. No time to shave. I put my glasses back on and check myself over in the mirror. I think I might actually pass for normal, like someone who's got their shit half-together and definitely didn't have an ibuprofen and a cigarette for breakfast. I tell myself I can handle a public outing.

When I step back into the hallway, I can hear Harper laughing from her room. I make my way over to investigate. There's this dumb smile that I don't bother to fight as I catch Quistis adjusting the toque on Harper's head, pushing her hair into just the right place. Harper spots me looking, bounds up, and does a spin. "Ready! Auntie helped!"

So back to my original question: what would I do without Quistis Trepe? There's no good answer—not one I ever want to know. At this point, I can't picture my life without her. Still, I'd be lying if I said I knew how she'd react to my having a kid. She'd never really had a strong bond with Rinoa, their friendship more based in proximity at the time than anything else, but thankfully, that's not been true of what she's built with Harper. I can tell her caretaker instinct has kicked in, that innate sense she'd once described as being inherited from Ellone. And she seems to love being Harper's de facto aunt—she's become the one Harper shares her secrets with, the one she emulates, the one she looks up to in a way that's wholly different from her parents.

Quistis' half-grin is turned up to three-quarters now, and she gives me a quick look up and down. I feel her analyze me, quietly scrutinizing my choice of attire: my cigar-coloured khaki joggers, my denim jacket, my black sweater (not 500G, in case you were wondering). I don't tell her I feel pressured to keep up my appearance whenever I go out with her, but I think most people feel pressured to be better versions of themselves anytime she's around.

Still, my self-consciousness is starting to stir, and I can't help but ask, "Well? Good enough for you?"

She adjusts the collar of my jacket, takes a step back, nods. "Good enough for me. Let's go."

—

OUR STOP AT the coffee shop lasts as long as it takes to get our order to-go, when Harper declares that she wants to walk around and look at the shops. The weekend has the streets alive in spite of the cold weather, and I keep my eye on her as she skips down the sidewalk, kicking leaves, humming to herself.

"So much energy," Quistis says. "You sure she's yours?"

I shrug. "It's more obvious when she's grumpy."

Harper turns around and makes a scowl. "Hey!"

I gesture to her. "See?"

Quistis lets out a laugh, but I catch just the barest hint of tiredness in it, draping overtop like a thin veil. In the late morning light, I can see those dark circles underlining her eyes still, and I'm almost certain Garden is taking a toll. In so many ways, the Galbadian campus is more regimented, more demanding, more strict. I've seen a lot of good SeeDs go there and burn out within months, and there's a pretty fucking good chance that Quistis will become one of them if she's not careful.

Part of me wants to tell her to run, run and never, ever look back. Go take a job at the university. Or start teaching at Ellone's elementary school. Hell, take a year off, see the world through the lens of a tourist rather than a SeeD. If I didn't have Harper to support, I'd be out in a heartbeat, too—and she's known that for ages, if not by my actions, then certainly by my wine-induced confession at her place a few months back.

I know she feels stuck for her own reasons. She might not tell me as much, but she doesn't have to. I've been there. She's good at her job in a way that not many are, in a way that makes her feel obligated to keep forging ahead, even when it doesn't make sense. She's elite. Students want to become her, to emulate her every move. But they're naïve. They don't know her like I do; they don't ever see the full effect Garden's had.

I've seen Quistis at her absolute best, but I've seen her through her absolute worst, too, the moments no one else has witnessed. The time her favourite student was killed in action on a training mission and we polished off two bottles of wine while we sat in my office, mute. The time when the stress of her job got so bad that I held her while she sobbed on my shoulder for the better part of an hour. The time she got too drunk after a bad day at work turned into an even worse date night and she called me to come get her. Did she puke in my car on the way home? I'll never say.

To the untrained eye, Quistis may be Garden, may be head instructor, may be an elite SeeD and everything else, but to me, she's an actual living, breathing, flawed, feeling human being. A wonderful one. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that Garden's not made for wonderful human beings. It's a place where people go to have all that sucked away and thrown into the vacuum of space.

I give her a little nudge. She sighs slightly, tries to hide it by taking a sip of her coffee. I'm starting to think maybe her visit is a way for her to find some sort of distraction, something to keep her mind off more plaguing thoughts. The noise of people, the slight sting of autumn wind, the comfort of someone familiar. It's a craving I know well enough. We always seem to run in parallel patterns, that way. I just wish I knew what to say; coming up with the right words has never been a strong suit.

Thankfully, Harper draws our attention with a small squeal as she spots her favourite shop; I look up to see the children's bookstore with the large display in one of the windows. Paper clouds hang from the ceiling over a painted cardboard castle, one donning the caption "Your Next Big Adventure is a Page Away". There's a variety of books sitting on shelves disguised as watchtowers: The Friendly Dragon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Sorceress & the Knight. She stops, presses her hands against the panes, peers inside.

"Want to check it out, Harps?" I ask. She nods.

I catch a reflection of us in the glass as we head for the entrance. In a way, we almost look like a family, a regular couple with a kid. Sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like if Quistis and I had ever gotten together. The thought's crossed my mind before, maybe even a little more frequently than I'd like to admit in recent years. Could I have feelings for her? Maybe. Maybe I'm just lonely. Still, part of me is scared of what it would mean. What if it didn't work out? Would it damage our twenty-seven-year friendship beyond repair? And what would that mean for Harper, losing her Aunt Quisty?

I try not to think about it. Instead, I open the door for Harper. It takes a moment to adjust from the grey day outside to the bright, warm walls of the shop, its cheery décor, the multi-coloured furniture. I let Harper explore the aisles of books, her eyes widening at the vivid illustrations, a colourful caterpillar, an old wizard casting a spell, a fox carrying a pocket watch. In so many ways, she looks like Rinoa did the first time she saw the library at Garden, almost as though a light had turned on in her imagination, illuminating each cover-bound world.

I catch myself thinking about my grandmother and father, how they were born storytellers, and I find myself hoping that Harper will one day be the same. I think that's something Laguna's been helping to instil in her—three generations should not all be bound to a singular fate. I remember how her eyes were alight yesterday as he shared tales of our family history. We both know that her world is still a blank slate; you could tell her that she could be anything, and it would actually ring true.

"She really loves books, huh?" Quistis asks, if for no other reason than to break the silence.

"Yeah," I say, and glance at her. She looks kind of sad. I think places like these remind her of the childhood she was promised but never lived. I've asked her on a few occasions what her foster family had been like, the one she lived with before she was shipped off to Garden, but she only ever let small pieces of her history bleed out.

From what I've put together, it wasn't good. Her foster parents existed in the cracks of a broken marriage that only money had been holding together. She was a would-be actress, he was some corporate bigshot who worked at an investment firm. I think the worst part was that in the times he was away, which was often, Quistis had actually bonded with her foster mother. But she was a despairing woman riddled with the haunting superstitions and paranoia about the world. I think her foster father believed that bringing Quistis into their lives would fix his wife, but of course a kid never fixes anything between a couple, and eventually he gave up on his plan and sent Quistis to Garden.

Quistis tucks her hair behind her ear, something I've come to recognize as a nervous habit. I start to feel a bit guilty that I led her in here; those doleful blue eyes say what she won't, they betray the smile she forces, her pale cheeks pinning the corners of her mouth and holding them in place.

"You want to go?" I ask.

"No." She shakes her head and walks over to Harper, kneels down beside her. She lets Harper guide her through rows and rows of books, stopping at different sections along the way—science, art, fiction. Harper's sure to share all the titles that catch her eye, one about dinosaurs, another about space, a story about a family of bears.

Quistis spots a different book, though, and she looks a bit nostalgic as she smiles and picks it up. It's a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit. She turns to Harper and shows it to her, her words soft and low as she explains the plotline in her best teacher voice. I can see Harper's face grow more and more curious, like she's being let inside a secret world that's unravelling only for her. Her hands clasp together just like Rinoa's, her little legs hopping with barely contained excitement, and then she's following Quistis to the register to check it out.

I actually remember the book, too—it was one Matron used to read us before bed. The rabbit's tale always made me kind of sad, especially then, but the moral of the story wasn't lost on me—the idea that love isn't always easy, and sometimes, you might just need to let go of the things that you cherish the most. But love, even lost, is still worthwhile. It's a lesson I'm still trying to learn, almost three decades later.

"Daddy, look what I got!" Harper pulls the book out of the paper shopping bag, beaming.

"That's great, Harps," I say. "Did you tell Quistis 'thank you'?"

"Repeatedly," Quistis chimes in.

I look at her, still tired but smiling down at Harper. There's an early memory that creeps into my mind then, one of us when we were little, back at the orphanage. I think it was the first time Quistis spoke to me, shortly after Ellone had been taken away. She'd heard my quiet sobbing and snuck over to my bunk after storytime, her three-year-old wisdom coming out as a whisper that cut through the dry Centran air. "Don't worry, Squall," she'd said, "the rabbit was okay. You will be too."

I still don't know if that ever ended up coming to fruition. Was there ever a time that I was okay? I'm not sure, but seeing her now with my daughter, it's easy to feel like maybe one day I could be, and that maybe not all the love in my life is lost, after all.

—

I DROP OFF Harper shortly before dinner. Quistis tags along for the ride; she greets Rinoa with a small wave from the sidewalk as I give Harper a goodbye kiss just inside the foyer. I don't tell her that my anxiety level had risen several points on the drive over, my mind still racing over whether or not the black Range Rover would still be parked outside. It wasn't. I let myself exhale.

We go back to my townhouse, and we're barely a minute inside before she's perusing my liquor cabinet almost as if she's shopping it; she checks the label on the gin, looks over the rye I'd bought the last time I was in Timber. She settles on a 30G bottle of whisky, grabs a couple glasses, and pours it over ice. I'm a bit surprised she's picked the cheap stuff, but I say nothing as she hands me a drink and sits down on the couch, still draped in blankets from the night before.

I take a sip and give her a look. "Something you want to say?"

She lets out that sad, tired laugh again. "I don't know."

"Don't give me that." I sit down beside her.

"Funny," she downs nearly half the contents in one un-Quistis-like swig, grimaces, "how you've evolved."

"'Evolved'?"

"You never used to be curious about what I had to say." She shrugs. "But…I do like talking to you more than a wall. So I guess there's that."

I really do hate that my stupid fucking talk-to-a-wall comment has been burned into her memory after all this time. I was such an asshole to her that night. But what can I say at this point? The moment's almost twelve years old; there's no taking it back, no changing anything that's already been said. I run my free hand through my hair, let out a long, slow breath I didn't know I was holding. "I like talking to you, too."

And I do, even if she raises an eyebrow and throws me a thin, crooked grin. Does that mean I've evolved? I think the phrase she's looking for is "grown up". I've always cared, even when I was a kid; it's just that back then I didn't know how to show her (or anyone else) anything but a cold shoulder.

"What am I doing, Squall?" she blurts out. Her question catches me off-guard.

"With what?" I ask dumbly.

"I just…" She finds her composure, restarts. "Do you ever feel like you've hit a plateau? Or wonder if this is all you'll ever have?"

All. The. Time. "Sure."

It's funny how she's saying this now, when she's the one who always told me to try and picture a brighter future. I get it though; it's hard not to be jaded—no matter the optimism at the start, it all goes flat, little by little, like a stone that's eroded under the weight of a million ocean tides. Quistis has been a SeeD for half her life—fifteen years of crashing waves.

"It's ridiculous, I know," she says. "I'm just paranoid lately. I keep thinking, what if I look back one day and my whole life was traded in just to burn out at this place?"

"It's not ridiculous to feel that way." I wish I could channel some of Laguna's energy. You'd think spending all day yesterday with him, maybe I'd get a glimmer of it, a small sliver of an optimist's perspective, but it almost feels like attempting to call up paramagic without a Guardian—it's just not there. I try to do my best, anyways. "You're a lot more than just Garden. You know that, right?"

I take another drink and put my glass down on the coffee table. She's got her gaze set on nothing, eyes still like empty blue pools, pale hair framing her Dolletian face. Quistis is not Renoir or Manet. She is Picasso's Girl before a Mirror, her angular expressions, a picture of duality. Who is she: SeeD or self? Right now, she is caught in the same struggle as I am, wondering if this is it, if this is just how life goes, trapped staring at this constant reflection of the person she's supposed to be, but somehow, isn't.

"I have an assignment this week," I say. I figure if anything, I can at least let her know she's not alone. "Some security detail for this politician from Timber."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." I lean forward and make eye contact with her. "I can't say I'm feeling all that excited. Extra pay and a change of scenery for a day, sure. But it's like everything else. I'm just not into it."

"I'm not into it, either… Everything feels so much harder, now," she says. "Getting reprimanded last Sunday didn't help. I spent all week questioning myself. Should I be doing this, what if they get mad about that…"

"Fuck 'em."

That earns me a laugh, a real one this time, her blue eyes turning bright, a flash of a smile that isn't forced. She holds her drink up. I grab mine off the table and clink the rim of my glass against hers, a toast to our shared disdain. We polish off the contents, cheap whisky burning trails all the way down, until there's nothing left but melting ice.

She puts her glass down on the coffee table and pulls her feet up onto the couch. Her head falls into her waiting hand, propped up by the armrest. She looks over at me, that brightness dulling as quickly as it came. "Don't let Harper become one of us."

I shake my head. "Absolutely not."

"Good."

Just the thought of Harper being shipped off to Garden makes me uneasy. I look at Quistis, and I can see the sacrifices she's made, sitting plainly in the fine lines that have settled in the corners of her eyes, or the slump in her shoulders.

I know she feels the same as I do, but she deals with it so differently, so deliberately, like being anything less than flawless would show a lack of resolve. She's just so acutely afraid of failure—that night all those years ago, when she lost her instructor license, was her first taste of it. And the shock of knowing she was capable of failing like that at all, I think it broke her in a way; before then, she'd always been regarded as the prodigy, the poster child of Garden, the model of a perfect SeeD.

Now it's almost as though she knows better—she knows she isn't perfect—but she's too entrenched in this save face mentality to change. I think she's scared, like if she lets up even for a moment, she'll lose her grip on everything. But her standards are just too high, even for herself. I get exhausted just thinking about how hard it must be to try and measure up, day in, day out.

I've never bothered with trying to be perfect. Nowhere near. Maybe I should've. I might have extended my time with Rinoa if I had at least made an attempt. But I was never the poster child for anything. Instead, they labelled me a problem the moment I stepped foot in Balamb, and my affinity for apathy never really seemed to wane after that.

I get up, fish out my pack of Malboro Reds, and step halfway onto the patio to light one up. Fuck perfect, anyways. Perfect is a lie, something unattainable. It's a paradigm people dangle out in front of you like a carrot in front of a rabbit while they tell you to just work a little harder, or go a little faster, when all they really want is for you to be a little more like them. I exhale out into the cold, my eyes fixated on the smoke as it trails away with the breeze.

"You said I'm more than Garden," Quistis says, pulling my blanket over her legs to fend off the air spilling in from the patio door. "I wish I could say I felt that way."

I flick a bit of ash off the end of my cigarette and turn my attention back to her. "You are, though." And it's true. She's more than Garden, and she's more than 500G sweaters, and she's more than Coco Mademoiselle, and she's more than all these things she seeks shelter in. It's almost bizarre to me that she can't see it.

Her face contorts. I picture those thick, black outlines, the reds and the purples of the reflected girl in Picasso's mirror, her pitted eyes. But she's just that—a reflection. Not real.

Quistis reaches for her empty glass, disappointed that it's somehow still empty, as if it was supposed to get up and refill itself.

I finish my smoke and go to grab the whisky bottle from the liquor cabinet, setting it down in front of her as I find my spot back on the couch. She pours us another round. I can already tell she's going to be crashing in my living room tonight. I don't mind. She does this sometimes, whenever the weight of her world becomes just a bit too heavy to bear on her own. Maybe I should start a halfway house, call it Squall's Home for Wayward SeeDs.

Still, it bothers me, seeing her like this week after week. I nudge her foot with mine and try to draw her from her thoughts. "You picked The Velveteen Rabbit because of me, didn't you?"

She takes a sip. There's no grimace this time. "I wasn't sure you'd remember that. We were both so small."

"Of course I do," I say with a small nod. "You told me everything was going to be okay."

"And was it?" she asks.

"I don't know," I admit, reaching for my newly refilled drink. The second one burns a little less. "But…I'm still glad you said it. I'd always thought you were just bossy and difficult. But you became my first friend because of that night."

There's a ghost of a laugh. "I think I'm still bossy and difficult."

"You are," I say. "Dragging me out on my lazy Sunday." My remark turns her lips up into a smirk. I continue, "I don't know what I'd do without you, though."

Quistis' face reddens, from embarrassment or whisky or a bit of both. And she casts her gaze down to the floor, then, almost a bit sheepish as she whispers back, "I don't know what I'd do without you, either."