I clicked the pen in my hand with quick, jerky motions, until my thumb slid over the cheap plastic to hit my fingers instead. I looked up at the clock. I shouldn't be waiting in line. The smart thing, the thing a good student would do, would be to check their equipment. Maybe work out whatever awful knot I could feel forming between my shoulder blades. But who was I kidding? I've never been a good student. I didn't choose this. The pen creaked in my fist. I ignored another backward glance from the guy ahead of me. The wait would be worth it. I was likely to die today, and I wasn't going to do so on an empty stomach. Even prisoners got to choose their last meal, and I've damn well been a prisoner of Balamb Garden.
As the student in front of me shuffled forward, I followed suit.
Memories of the faculty risking it all to kill the headmaster crept back into my mind and for a moment I thought I could actually feel the blood straining against my vessel walls. I almost got my head blown off leaving my own dorm room. Goddamn nutcases brought Bombs into the school. No one's even been by to look at the scorch marks still left around my doorway. I felt my frown deepen. Maybe that was the sort of thing faculty would have been in charge of seeing to, and they're pretty fuckin' dead now. I helped make sure of that. I rolled my shoulders forward and back a few times, working out the tension forming; pushing painfully crystalline images from my head of stabbing a man I knew to death three feet from my bedroom door. The outer casing of my pen cracked. Frankly, if their timing hadn't been such shit I'd have been happy to throw my lot in with NORG. I wasn't one of the headmaster's precious SeeDs, I didn't even like the man. But I killed for him, all the same. Killed, almost died, and all on a stomach of wheat crackers and cheese closer to rubber than food, ugh.
The gap between me and the guy ahead in line widened, I took another step forward.
Of course, I couldn't dwell on the absurdity of that day without thinking of the missiles. Perhaps it's just my destiny to explode one day. Can't say I love the idea of becoming chunky human stew, but I'm past the point of fighting destiny. I tried fighting the move to Balamb, tried fighting my uncle's insistence that I enroll, and despite my total commitment to being a first-class slacker, it feels like the last five years of my life have been spent fighting. For Cid. For the Garden. For someone else's dream. I regret every day since we crashed ass-first into Fishermen's Horizon that I didn't just run away like the Headmaster did.
I tried to suppress it, but a brief fit of laughter came bubbling up from some demented place in the depths of my chest and spilled out in awkward wheezes. The others in the cafeteria glanced my way with expressions of annoyance, some with worry, none willing to maintain their stare for long. I guess now was not a time for laughter, but I struggled to contain it. Imagine killing in a man's name only for him to dip and leave a kid in his place right after. My giggles died down into coughs as I wiped tears from my eyes, noticing too late the ink staining my fingers. I wiped my hand off on my uniform and sighed. Why shouldn't I laugh? It's all such a joke, after all. Just not a very funny one.
"We're going on a journey. This is a journey to defeat the sorceress." I could still hear the headmaster's last orders as precisely as if they were coming in over the garden speakers all over again. Perfect was the recreation of it in my memories – even the odd crackle of his voice that happened whenever anyone spoke over the PA system. I'm not sure why I remember it so well. Another tasteless joke I guess, that I'd have a flawless recollection of so many useless and painful things but I couldn't recall the last person I'd kissed, the chorus of my favorite song from before enrollment, or that one girl's name I couldn't stop thinking about for a while. . . My fingers twitched and I could feel the delicate weight of ink shifting with the motion as it pooled into drops at my fingertips. I wiped them away again.
"This journey will involve many battles," he said. "A well-qualified leader is needed for this," he said. "Therefore, I am appointing Squall as your new leader. He will decide our destination and battle plan. Everyone, please follow his orders." he begged. It was a pathetic end, really. Maybe that's why it's so stuck in my head. It was at home with all the other pathetic things that passed for 'thought' in there.
I turned my head to the side until I felt a deeply satisfying pop in my neck. Squall. There was one hell of a kid. Went toe to toe with a sorceress and lived to tell about it. Metaphorically speaking anyway, I'm not sure I've heard him talk about anything, ever, much less any of his unlikely accomplishments. Escaped from a sorceress prison, survived torture from her knight, quelled the NORG-influenced uprising, and drove us away from the missiles too. I didn't know him, he didn't strike me as the type of person you could really 'get to know'. But I couldn't say I minded the idea of taking orders from him any more or less than taking them from anyone else at this point. My jaw ached as my teeth slid uncomfortably over one another. Why does it have to be any of us anyway? I firmly believed Squall's heroics were luck. Luck that he made it here on time, luck that there was a way to move the garden, luck that he found it and it worked. I opened and closed my mouth a few times. Such inexplicable luck we all seemed to share because of him. I guess it's just his destiny. Maybe he's done fighting it too.
The guy ahead of me stepped up to the cafeteria counter, I marched close behind him.
And what a fucking journey it had been so far.
Between killing members of our own faculty, being adrift at sea, coming home to our town under Galbadian control, and witnessing the wreckage of our sister garden, Trabia, I've had my fill of journeying. Trabia. Could a name haunt you? Hollow out your chest and tighten it at the same time? I always believed I'd long since lost any softness I might have had as a kid, before my parent's deaths, before my uncle, before Garden. I often fancied imagining the kind of person I would be had I grown up normally, without all this violence. What I would be like if I had learned how to play an instrument rather than use a gun, or how to bake those fancy woven breads mother adored instead of knowing the tactical benefits and drawbacks to hostage-taking. I liked to pretend I was kind. Soft-hearted. That I tended a community garden and raised small animals. In my imagination I wasn't so dead inside, I hadn't been whittled down to a sharp point. I still had people I cared about, that I loved, and in turn, I was loved and all the things I did mattered and made people happy. I would pretend to be a person that still felt something other than angry or nothing at all.
When I set foot on Trabia's broken foundation and saw the makeshift graveyard the surviving students had created for their friends and co-workers, I realized I wasn't so removed from the person in my imagination as I'd thought. I hadn't realized I still had a heart to break until it happened. And since then I've wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of here, forget fighting, forget this place, forget how to efficiently cut a man's throat or breach a building and learn about flowers, or chocobo, or fishing. Anything to protect the little bit of humanity I still had.
But I'd promised. Until I was twenty. The garden could have me for that long and I could have what my parents left for me in return. I was so close, been here this long, what could happen in just a few months, right? I felt a bitter smile stretch across my mouth just as the PA system crackled and a voice I didn't recognize began to speak.
"This is Squall speaking." A beat. "This is an emergency so listen carefully. We're going into battle against Galbadia Garden."
I hung my head and let my sight bore into the tile between my feet. Another battle against people who were meant to be my contemporaries. Would there even be any Garden's left after today? Would that even be so bad?
An uncomfortably long moment passed before Squall's voice crackled over the system again, "1st and 2nd Class Sabers, assemble in the parking lot. Those with MG rank of 3 or above, head for the 2nd-floor deck and await instructions. Be sure to warm up. The enemy will probably come aboard. We must concentrate our forces at the front gate and the quad. If your Student ID is even, report to the quad. If it's odd, report to the front gate. Those who have Student ID numbers ending with an 8, take care of the junior classmen. Lastly, Quistis, Zell, Selphie. Come up to the bridge right away!" The PA system static dissolved into heavy silence stretched taut with the promise of bloodshed. The atmosphere quivered for that brief moment between thought and action, then erupted into the organized chaos of students clamoring out of their seats, shouting over one another, the squeaking of their boot soles against tiles as they ran towards their posts, the rustle of uniforms and clinking of weapons being inspected. The atonal theme song of Garden life.
I was starting to think what a shame it was Balamb had no public speaking classes. I rose my head and set my gaze forward, pleading internally for my heart to slow down. I was expecting too much, what could anyone say to make this palatable? I was impressed by our young commander's stoicism, even if I wasn't comforted by it. I felt silly for wishing I was. At least the plan was sound. All I really had to do was show up and survive.
Everyone else in the cafeteria abandoned what they were doing, ostensibly to find their place among the assembling ranks. With no one in my way, I strode to the counter. If I was going to stare down fellow students and slaughter kids even younger than I was, I wasn't doing it on an empty stomach. The quad wasn't going anywhere.
I smiled at the cafeteria lady, an involuntary gesture devoid of any warmth. She always gave me the genuine article in return though. I placed my order and that smile faltered.
"No more hot dogs today, I'm afraid."
Hyne fucking dammit. The pen finally burst under the pressure of my fist.
I scurried towards the quad, stuffing crackers into my mouth. They tasted like ink.
