I startled awake and blinked blearily at my cascades of memories of the previous day. My backpack was still on and it was still and dark at the northern edge of the forest. Following Seifer's twelve note whistling into the night, I didn't have the energy when we finally stopped to make a campsite. Or eat.

His voice, that song, so melancholy, was the only thing that grounded me through the night as I stumbled through the forest and the detritus below.

"Where are we going?" I asked more than once. He mumbled some lyric in the same melody as his whistling and I wondered if his assessment of his sanity was accurate. At one point he did finally decide to answer me, probably tired of hearing the same question over and over. The answer was as disturbing as the lack of one.

"I'm going to hell, but I have things to do first."

I stopped.

"What does that mean?"

"It means there are things I want to accomplish before I'm killed, Tilmit."

So I was back to Tilmit. And we had been getting on so well… For a hunter and her prey. Or his prey. I started walking again before he got far enough away that I couldn't hear him.

All of the insects and nocturnal animals had come out by this time and they sang their night songs, with an almost harmonious cadence that took me to a home that was not home anymore. GARDEN was too big, insulated, and antiseptic to hear any creatures outside it and Trabia was far too cold for anything to celebrate the sun going down, but at the orphanage there was a symphony to be heard though the thin windows at dark. Crickets and frogs sang us all an encore lullaby even after Matron left us in our rooms to sleep. That little constant helped a lot in an ever-changing world of a young orphan.

"Have you been back to the orphanage?" I asked him, for little other reason than to keep myself in the present, awake, and not think about anyone's prospects of the afterlife. Too many were gone, too many seemingly close to joining them as I wandered through the darkness following a whistling harbinger of… Something; hell if I knew what.

"Not lately."

"It's kind of fallen apart."

"Shame."

"Yeah."

I squeezed some of the water out of my hair from the drips on the trees. "I miss it there. My childhood."

He snorted. "Your childhood? I'm not sure it ended."

"Hey! It ended all too soon…"

Maybe that was why I did the things I did to try to make everyone happy pretending I was. I wanted back what I never really had, what none of us really had. Was it possible to will into existence a simpler reality in which faith in goodness, in impossible happiness and harmony, were not just ignorant, childish notions? I could… have, vanquished nightmares and monsters, but nothing I have done made any ideal closer to the truth.

Truth didn't much matter anyway to the world and it was an ugly thing, truth. Without it, what hope is there for justice, reward and punishment, either temporal or eternal, or hope itself, for that matter?

"I know," Seifer said after a moment. "I miss it too," he admitted.

We walked in heavy, shadowy silence for a time, and I stewed wondering if I had chemical imbalance due to junctioning over the years or if I was justifiably despairing.

"When I went to GARDEN, most of you had been adopted," his voice broke me of my reverie, thankfully. "Squall and I were left behind with Matron after the rest of you had been taken to new homes, and seeing the rest of you go had done nothing for his loneliness or my anger.

"But I had to try, to get along with him I mean. Once in a while he'd respond to my pleading, threats, or invitations to explore the swamps or shores, but a reluctant explorer is not the same as an eager one. I suppose I wasn't much of a 'Sis' either… It was only like that for a few months and then I was shipped off to GARDEN in Balamb. I was seven."

"And the rest is history?" I interrupted, feeling like I was about to go on a long guilt trip if I didn't. I guess I was going to hell with him. No longer guilt trip than the road to hell…

"You know the problem with history? When you set out to make it, you don't get to write it." He sighed. "Nobody should ever give a kid with burgeoning romantic ideals a weapon…"

"Why are you telling me all this?" desperately asked.

"Because, as unlucky as we both may be for the truth of it, I finally have family again, and you're it."

I stopped.

"Coming?" he asked me, after a long while, from far ahead.

I could barely see. So I followed my brother into oblivion, glad that he never voiced the accusation that I knew now to be true: "You and the rest all forgot me." But he never forgot his family. Our lives were tortured at least partly because of it. He was walking back to me and I was trying not to cry, failing. If only we grew up together instead of apart…

Suddenly a leaden arm was around my shoulders, keeping me from planting my face in a tree I hadn't noticed.

"Hey. We'll never know what might have been. No use crying over it. I sure won't. Maybe…" he paused. "Maybe this is the best outcome of our lives. Maybe it'll be all right in the end because of all that came before. It'll be all right in the end. I promise. I'll be there."

I choked out a laugh that was more than half-sob.

"When did you get so wise?"

"I've had a lot of time to think lately."

"You have? Between the world's governments, lawyers, and armies chasing you all over creation?"

"Well, it focuses the mind."

We trudged along in the thinning undergrowth of the forest. I think I must've somehow fallen asleep walking, because the darkness seemed a bit brighter and the ocean was able to be heard in the distance when my head snapped up and I took another step out of my unconsciousness. There was faint 'warking' from somewhere in the trees.

Starving and more than a little wet, cold, and sore, I tore into some preserves and hard bread in my pack and walked out between the last of the trees. Seifer was gone. No traces of ashes or footprints in the darkness. So I fumbled my way through the thicket surrounding the forest while trying to shrug into an insulated jacket and looked out to the ocean. I'd traveled far to the north, I realized, probably close to the latitude of Trabia, though the climate on this eastern peninsula was noticeably milder, especially at this time the year.

I smelled lilacs. Probably hundreds of them, making the air itself honey-like with the scent soaked in. They bloomed in Balamb over a month ago, after we came home from time compression. It was like I'd been through another year, another life, since then.

Wishing I could see the bushes too, I ate my way to the shore, where I had the vague notion of a large island on the other side of the channel is was facing. Almost a beacon in the darkness of the waters was a shock of blonde hair. He bobbed over and under the churning of the waves, beneath clouds so thick they made you lose faith in the sun, that made the earth feel still, but you could almost feel them hurtling overhead.

Heralds of something even darker.

Yelling and waving my arms frantically, I tried to get him to hear me, wave back, turn around and not leave me… But I don't think he noticed, and he drifted away into the darkness leaving me stranded there on the shores of hell.