Disclaimer: I make no claim whatsoever to the characters or world of Final Fantasy VIII, which is the property of Squaresoft/Square Enix.
Chapter I
"Damn thing won't open."
"Let me try." Selphie pushed Irvine's hands away and jiggled the shiny gold key in the blackened, flaked iron lock. "I'm pretty sure it's just stiff with all the rust."
"Hurry up and get us in." He grinned. "This is gonna be fun."
She shot him the side-eye. "You're just happy 'cause you get to be alone with me for the day."
Irvine's blissful enthusiasm would not be dampened. "Damn right I am, Sefie. And who could blame me?"
She liked Irvine. She quite liked fooling around with him. Letting him kiss her. Letting him slip his hands under her shirt, when she was feeling particularly generous. But every now and again she'd catch him looking at her like a devoted puppy, and she'd back away. She really didn't need that. Her life was too busy, too interesting, for that kind of... thing.
He was doing it right now. The puppy-dog eyes. He probably didn't even realize how lovesick he looked.
"I got my gun, got my girl, and we're goin' on a good old-fashioned ghost hunt. Couldn't be happier."
She snorted. Ghosts. "Yeah, right. I can't believe the Duke's family let a hokey story like that keep them out of here for so long. Idiots."
"Hokey, huh? Let's find out."
The handle finally turned, and the huge oak door to Hasberry Castle creaked slowly open.
The Duke of Dollet cleared his throat. "The mission objective itself is, it pains me to say, something of an embarrassment."
Irvine stretched out his legs, propping his cowboy boots on top of the Duke's polished writing desk. "No need to worry about that, your Grace. SeeDs are immune to embarrassment in all its forms."
The Duke's eyes traveled to the spurs on Irvine's scuffed boots, and he blinked at the fresh scratches they had left on the gleaming surface of the desk.
"I... see."
Selphie nudged Irvine sharply from behind and directed a glare into his ponytail. You really should be house-trained by now, Kinneas, she thought.
"Your Grace, our Commander indicated that our objective is to reclaim Hasberry Castle for the Dukedom," she said. "Has it been overrun by monsters?"
"There has been some infestation, naturally, but not to a level that our army couldn't handle. No, I'm afraid that the problem is that any troops that have been sent there in the past decades have refused to ascend to the second floor. Overwhelmed by... dread, I'm told."
"Dread?"
"The general consensus is that the castle is haunted. I must say that we Dolletians are rather superstitious about that sort of thing."
Irvine smirked. "So you just left it to the ghosts?"
The Duke scratched the end of his nose. "We did."
"Why hire us now, then?"
"With SeeD's rise to prominence, I rather thought that it was time to try again. The last expedition to the castle was when I was a boy. My father considered it a lost cause. I am the Duke, now, however. And I find it embarrassing that a fear of ghosts has prevented my family from returning to our ancestral seat. It remains, after all, the largest surviving castle in the Western continent. The jewel of the old Empire."
Selphie leaned forward in her chair. "How long has it been abandoned?"
"Since the aftermath of the raids on Malgo and Hasberry by Galbadian rebels prior to the Lunar Cry. Not the, ah, recent Lunar Cry, of course."
She made a swift mental calculation. "So roughly a hundred and ten years?"
The Duke's face lit up with approval. "You know your history, my dear. Good. No wonder your Commander recommended you both so highly. I can see you're the best team for the job."
Irvine leaned to the side of his chair, and slipped his arm around Selphie's shoulder, ignoring her attempts to shrug it off.
"We're the best team for any job, your Grace. Her, and me."
Selphie stepped cautiously into the cavernous atrium, and surveyed its size with awe. "This must've been the Great Hall."
She closed her eyes, and just for a moment, tried to imagine it at the height of the Holy Dollet Empire. The crumbling walls would be festooned with banners, the now-shattered windows gleaming with intricate stained glass. She pictured the Hall packed with handsome Imperial knights, lords and ladies, servants-
Irvine swung his rifle to his shoulder. "Incoming, Sef."
A pair of scuttling Geezards leapt from the spiral staircase, and Irvine dispatched one neatly with a single bullet, letting Selphie take the other out with her nunchaku. She kicked the carcasses away with a flick of her boots, and jumped onto the bottom stair.
"The only way is up, right?" she said over her shoulder as she raced up the steps, and Irvine laughed, loping up the staircase three steps at a time with his long legs, soon overtaking her.
"I call shotgun!" he yelled as he dashed into the upstairs corridor, then halted abruptly at the open door to the first room.
"What?" demanded Selphie, pushing past him into a broken, once-ornate bedroom, the rotted stumps of its full-poster bed drawing her eyes to the threadbare quilt, where a corpse, no, not a corpse, she's breathing...
Selphie stood very still and watched the impossibly old woman lying on the bed as she drew slow breaths, her face like crumpled paper, her flesh barely clinging to her bones.
Behind her, Irvine stepped forward. She didn't have to look round to know he had removed his hat in respect. "Ma'am, are you hurt?"
The woman turned her milky-white eyes on him. "Not you," she rasped.
Irvine took a pace towards her, stopping in his tracks when she let out an angry snarl like an alley cat.
"Stay back, boy."
Her eyes traveled to Selphie, and she tilted her hairless head.
"You. Come here."
Selphie took a tentative step towards the bed, then when the woman remained still, she moved closer.
She was close enough now to see the blue veins in the woman's corpse-like skin, and the way her eyes shifted in her hollow face. She looked Selphie up and down.
"You'll have to do."
The woman's milky eyes started to glow with a faint greenish light, and Selphie was gripped with the odd feeling that the woman could see straight into her head, right to the back of Selphie's skull.
Without warning, she sat up bolt upright in the bed, her thin bones snapping upwards like rigor mortis, and reached out her skeletal hand to grab Selphie's fingers tightly. Her flesh was barely there; Selphie felt as if she was clutching at a spiderweb.
"Take it."
The woman's eyes betrayed a smile of triumph, of release, and then it came.
In the space of a few seconds, Selphie's world shifted on its axis, and everything changed. North was now South, zero had become one, death was life. Where there had been silence, there was now a cacophony of sound bursting free. She let it wash over her, and looked on with a detached curiosity as the woman's papery skin sagged and melted away into fine dust, the worn remnants of her bones cracking and crumbling onto the bed.
Irvine gave a startled cry from behind, and Selphie stood, and straightened her shoulders.
"What the hell?" he spluttered. "She just... died?"
"She was already dead. She couldn't pass on until she gave her powers away."
"You mean-"
"Yeah." A small, spinning ball of lightning rose from her palm. She watched idly as it bounced around, then tried passing it from one hand to the other. It flew to her other palm, and sunk back into her flesh. She shivered at the sensation. The sparks were white-hot, but she felt no pain.
Irvine's eyes were wide, incredulous. "Holy hell, Sefie."
"Yeah."
"What do we do now?"
She shrugged, registering a stab of annoyance at the word we. This was hers.
"How do you mean?"
"Well," he floundered, "what line do you want to take in our report to the Duke?"
"We tell him the ghost has been eliminated. Using undisclosed SeeD methods." Selphie brushed past him to leave the room, and he trotted behind her.
"Yeah, he doesn't need to know the details. But the report to Squall... that's gonna have the whole story, right?"
"I suppose." The presence of the Commander's girlfriend at Balamb Garden meant that any attempt to hide what had happened would be futile. Rinoa would know straight away. Selphie had heard it said that one sorceress always recognizes another on sight. Perhaps Rinoa would see her in a different way now. She might see Rinoa differently, too. The thought fizzled and popped in her head, and she liked it.
"You could probably use a knight, huh?" Irvine tried to mask his hopeful tone with a chuckle at the end, but Selphie was not fooled. She never was.
"Maybe." She paused at the top of the staircase, and slung him a sidelong glance. "Doesn't mean it has to be you, though."
Irvine clasped his chest and staggered backwards in mock injury. "Brutal, Sef."
She ignored him, and descended the staircase.
"Look, don't worry," he said when he reached her side as she crossed the debris-strewn floor of the Great Hall. "All it really means is that you don't need to carry a stock of spells anymore. That's the only thing that's changed. Hey, think of all the money you'll save the Garden's para-magic budget. Xu might give you a bonus."
She stared at him blankly. This is an accounting issue to you?
Irvine thrust his hands in his pockets and grinned. "Damn, I'm getting jealous. You won't have to spend time Drawing magic ever again. It'll be awesome, Sefie."
"Awesome. Yeah."
She let him take the wheel on the drive back to Dollet, and gazed out the car window, motionless, feeling the magic creep and crawl under her skin.
Irvine kept glancing at her. After a while, he leaned over the gearstick to pat her on the shoulder.
"You're still the same ol' Sefie. It'll be fine, I promise."
I don't want it to be fine, she thought. I want it to be more than that. I want it to be... everything.
The magic tingled at her fingertips, and she let it seep out: over her knuckles, across her palms, caressing her wrists.
And I'm not the same old Selphie.
How could I be?
A/N:
Starting two fics at the same time - I'm probably making things needlessly complicated for myself, but here goes. They both start with a castle, but other than that they're going to have very little in common. This one's going to be fairly short. Thank you for reading! Reviews welcome! - colobonema