Disclaimer: Still don't own FF8. I never will. As an aspiring neurologist, I understand that I won't make enough money to buy the rights to something so perfect—ever. The only people who have problems with their brains that are halfway rich are politicians. And that, my friends, is depressing. I'm not Cat Power either. That's right, I'm surrounded by the best art in the world and I own nothing (cries).
Fool's Gold
By giggleplex
One absent truth
The one horrible thing I saw
What you truly wanted to become
And who you thought I was
The fall, the fall,
Afraid, the blood
Runs deeper than the grave
It goes all the way down those tracks
Everybody bow your head
For the greatest inspiration
A complete contradiction
Of ways.
- Cat Power "In This Hole"
She paused.
"Quistis Trepe?" her tone was disbelieving.
For once, the Wanderer cursed his self-imposed isolation of society. She said that familiar name with such certainty and familiarity, that he felt all the more ignorant for not recognizing it. Had the Fool realized how well known this woman was?
A trickle of doubt settled unpleasantly in his stomach.
Was this a matter of possible love at all? Could this man have just been a watcher, an admirer . . . was the Wanderer's own concern for this man's story, built upon a tradition of lies and misconceptions?
The woman continued to stare, and the Wanderer's patience was wearing thin.
"Yes." He gritted out.
"Quistis Trepe." She repeated again "She's the forefront medical researcher in the world! Half of the technology you see around this hospital has been developed by her."
The wanderer felt an involuntary gasp of surprise.
She ran a hand through her coarse, graying hair and averted her eyes to the darkening window. Outside, the street-lights flickered on.
"She and Selphie Tilmitt. Ever since the last Sorceress War, SeeD has managed to be the leading sponsor for healthcare in the world. Those two . . . it's amazing what they've done. I respect them both more than you could ever imagine."
He remained stock still. Her eyes were misty as she slipped on her long brown coat, and dislodged her hair caught in the collar. She did not look at him, but appeared to be thinking very thoughtfully.
Click-Clack. Her heels trailed to the window. He pursed his lips.
"I suppose this has something to do with him, doesn't it?" she said quietly, still looking out the window.
The Wanderer followed her gaze, but felt unable to focus on anything in particular. His thoughts were too tumultuous for specifics.
"Yes."
She sighed.
He felt momentarily frustrated. That she could ever claim to relate to the presence of confusion and weariness to his mind—that she could ever expect—
Wait.
She hadn't even said anything. I'm on hair-trigger. The only place paranoia is useful is on the battlefield, but this isn't a battlefield . . . is it?
What am I thinking?! Even I don't know. Why is everything offensive to me? Why does everything seem like some sort of outright challenge?
He felt a wave of dizziness.
I may not know what I'm thinking, but I do know that I'm thinking too much.
"Why are you so determined to help him?" she asked frankly, finally turning to face him. "He's a murderer. An infamous brute. He's—"
"He's changed." He interrupted tartly.
Her eyes furrowed. She stared at him, as if judging his honesty, his character, and everything in between.
He held her gaze for an indeterminate amount of time, before he felt another rush of vertigo. The Wanderer closed his eyes and fought the urge to sway. When he swallowed with effort, he found his mouth dry.
This was no battle, but was it a test?
The Wanderer had already made his decision. He was inspired. He had been awake for days of doubt, but finally, there was resolution to his gaze.
There was really only one path left. The woman across from him held enough doubt for the both of them.
There was only one question left.
"How can I find her?"
He was so overwhelmed by his own sense of pride at his decisiveness, that he did not even remember falling to the ground, unconscious, as his body gave way to full fatigue.
Seifer was eleven years old when he discovered girls. Five years after he left the orphanage for the grand soldier-factory of Galbadia Garden. It was in his first growth spurt, when his legs were thin and springy like willow-branches, and his hair a tousled mess of carelessness.
He decided pursuing his interest in the opposite gender when he looked over at shapely Diana Selt one day in history class. She bent over to pick up her pencil, and suddenly Seifer realized that the curvy shape made when her hips jutted out and her skirt flared slightly open from her thighs was unexplainably pleasing to him.
At first, his eyes widened and he blushed secretly at his revelation. It became difficult to concentrate on the Instructor's lecture when his mind began a rapid slide-show of images and ideas that even he wouldn't dare admit to anyone.
After class, he accidentally bumped into Diana, but was too speechless to apologize. She looked at him with deep dark eyes and he caught the barest hint of red on her cheeks as well, before she scuttled away with two of her other friends.
True to his "big-shot" nature, Seifer started smirking a few minutes later. It was a thereby permanent smirk, a powerful smirk. He realized at that point that he had a particular power over beings of the opposite gender . . . and he had always loved power.
He thought he loved power more than anything, if only subconsciously, but how wrong his instincts proved in years, in lives later—under a muddy tent in a sweeping storm . . .
At the time of this realization, his friends were curious. They were also swept away with the power of that self-assured smirk, and struggled for anything to make themselves as authoritative as he. Most men, as Seifer would take a long time to realize, thirsted for power as if it was pure sustenance.
While none of them had really been attracted to girls at such a young age, they were overcome with what they "should" feel and "should" become. These "shoulds" came primarily from example. Those older, almost-SeeD's with their flirting and nudging and familiar guffaws of past exploits.
Seifer saw them every day in Garden. Despite this, no eleven-year-old could ever be accepted into their jokes and sarcasms. So Seifer assumed what it was that would make him older and more mature, consequently warping the arrogance often seen in teenagers, beyond recognition.
He soon became notorious.
But in the eyes of his peers, impossible to ignore or remain unscathed from his self-serving wit and logic that managed to degrade everyone around him. While quite lacking in apparent morals (he learned to ignore them), Seifer was undeniably charismatic. Through his arrogance and self-assurance, he became a God.
It was a twisted concept in the economics of good graces. Seifer and his three main friends (none of which he trusted) treated those around them as bad as they possibly could, and those same people flocked to them like seagulls spotting bread crumbs.
The act was invincible up until a certain day, when Seifer was 13.
By that point the mysteries of sex and the power latent in such intimacy were very open to Seifer. His inherent popularity had bled to the ranks of trainees, years older than him—particularly the female ones.
His promiscuity should have gotten him expelled. He was aware of this, but ignored it, as he did not think he liked living in Garden much in the first place. In truth, he often dreamed of traveling far, far away . . . to ultimately anyplace but Garden. He was there because he was expected to be, not because he wanted to.
On that day, he was haphazardly perched on the corner of a desk, facing his three best "friends." They were laughing over something wholly inappropriate to be discussing in a classroom, but they reveled in the inappropriate.
His hair was longer then. It was long enough to appear messy, but in truth he styled it without fail every morning so that it would appear natural. He was vain, then.
It would be impossible to recollect the exact rendition of the same subject in which they were so enamored at the time. He knew it had something to do with girls. With dirt. With scum.
The conversation lead to the necessity of a piece of paper, and corresponding pen. Full of hedonistic mirth over something-or-other, he swaggered over to his bag to retrieve the items.
He bumped into a chair on accident. A girl to the side giggled, and he glared at the offending object as if it was the one in fault. His glare trailed upward on its own accord, and he found himself looking at a person he hadn't even realized was there.
She did not look up.
He watched her for a few seconds of bated-breath realization.
She was older now, and her hair had grown all the way down to her shoulders into a neat, even line. Despite having two bulky hairpins above either ear, she was continuously brushing her hair behind her ears as she peered down on her reading.
Her uniform was a little worn, as if bought second-hand, but it was still in decently good shape. He wouldn't have noticed if she had been any other girl.
She was wearing glasses, unlike the last time he had seen her. They were monstrous, unfashionable spectacles in thick red plastic. The lenses were cut like fat eggs and the thick bifocals dividing each one in half, allowed for two distorted pictures of her eyelashes, one large and one very small.
In any case, he wasn't anything like the girls who graced his company for the past few years.
Perhaps it something beyond her humble, dotty appearance or it was precisely that she was not beautiful that made him unexplainably drawn to her. She was like a black hole. He couldn't stop—before he knew it, he sat down in the empty chair on the other side of her desk.
For a second before his bearings came back, she was ambrosia to his sense of self. As though he had waited all that time just to see her face once more . . .
When he finally did realize himself, it was just as her entire body stiffened suddenly. Slowly and with noticeable trepidation, her head rose. Finally, as a flourish to the movement, her eyes opened wide behind the two-toned glasses.
Her neck craned forward. She blinked.
"S-Seifer?"
A wave of intense panic came upon him the moment she said his name. He later accorded it to a sense of disgust, as if his name was somehow tarnished when someone of her obviously low place on the social ladder. He was immediately reminded of a child, breathing clumsily and fogging up a pristine window—clumsy, ignorant and possibly (unjustifiably) offensive.
Perhaps it was a subconscious instinct to remain untouchable; he managed to avoid looking in those icy eyes.
His hands clenched on the seat of his chair.
Quistis. His mind returned.
It was only when she repeated his name, a little surer, that he was jolted from his confusion into action.
Quistis.
"What the hell?" it was a question more towards himself than anything.
She shriveled.
"B-but Seifer, don't you remember me?" her voice was even quieter, and a great deal more desperate.
Had she not displayed such weakness, perhaps it would have turned out differently. Perhaps Seifer could have forgotten his addiction to pride, to power, and everything in between.
But she did, and with an automatic smirk he pounced on that open move without mercy or justification.
"Do you remember every bug you see on the side of the road?" he sneered.
She was visibly taken aback.
"Don't tell me you're that sentimental. No one's that weird." He pressed on.
She trailed a small hand up to her cheek, and it brushed gently on those atrociously large red glasses. The gesture was so sweet it almost choked him. It made him even more afraid, and consequently more furious.
"I," Seifer swallowed "I don't know who you are" I don't know a Quistis "or where you came from, but you're nothing. You should, I dunno, kill yourself and just . . . just—"
His eyes were mistakenly drawn into her own for just that single second. Those large eyes were not icy, but deep blue like the sea—and just as lonely.
They were swelling up with tears.
"—LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!"
There was instant silence in the classroom. Girls stilled their gossip to gaze toward him, boys bade their confusion through attempts at stoicism. No one besides Seifer had any idea what was going on.
But however concerning or disruptive the situation might have seemed, Seifer used his power and his charisma to its greatest extent. He swaggered up on lanky legs and rolled his eyes with a great deal of exaggeration. His eyes narrowed back down at that girl, down down she seemed so far down. Under the dirt. She could have been six-feet-under for all he cared.
One of his friends asked him about it with puzzled concern. He took one last look at the table where she was before, but she had fled. Her patched pencil-case remained.
The return to the question was backed by the preconception of the masses. That is, he drew on gossip, he drew on the objectivity of womankind, and he drew on carelessness.
In the world of Seifer, and the patriarchal world of SeeD, women were all the same. They all had one weakness, besides their physical weakness in battle. He attacked her where it would hurt the most.
"She's a slut." He answered. "Completely worthless."
The rest laughed. Seifer tried to smile, but for some reason he felt even emptier than before. As though . . . he was chipping away at his hollow humanity, and it was starting to crack.
However, it would be a long time before he could gather the courage to patch it up again.
The pounding of his heart was drowned out by the pounding of his hedonistic maliciousness. He could almost feel that something was wrong, but he could not actually hear anything.
Author's Notes -
Yeah. I suck.
It's been a while, but I'm almost done with all (six) of my college applications. I actually should be working on them as I am typing this. Ah well . . .
I didn't even get to the cool Quistis part. How dreadful. Well, I'll reinstate my promise that I will NOT make a pushover Quistis. I've had this idea of her as a trainee in my head for years, before this story had ever been thought about. Gahhh, so cool, at least to me.
Anywho, thank you for reading! Again, I would like to say "sorry" in about ten languages, but I can only speak two: sorry, gomen nasai.
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