On the water, even with the sun rising, the fog was taking on a different form and it lifted off the roiling waves like curtains of wispy ice trying to form. I loathed the idea of going out to sea in that churning, and surely cold, mass of whitecaps and dark ocean water, but Seifer was nearly out of sight. He looked like he was heading to the island in the northeast.
There was no way I was going to make a raft in time to keep him in sight. I turned and ran along the beach to see if there were any nearby settlements where I might find a boat. This part of the world was full of swamps and fjords and it had a modest tourist industry of boat tours along the forests and islands.
I tore through the rocky flotsam and quickly spied a shack ahead, with a jetty and small boathouse sticking into the water. Pounding on the door, I looked through the windows and saw the signs and clutter that meant a seasonal business which was not yet open. Finding my way around the kiosk and into the covered dock was easy. Whoever owned the place, which I now saw rented kayaks, left it unlocked if one was willing to wade into the sea a few meters and climb onto the pier.
As it turns out, I was only willing after I'd put on a small sized wetsuit that was left conveniently in an outdoor trunk, also unlocked after bashing it open.
In the boathouse were a couple dozen kayaks and paddles. Taking one down that looked newer, smaller, and well-sealed, I replaced it with a 1,000 gil note and prepared to traverse the sea.
The island did not look far, but where horizons were concerned looks could be deceiving, and I had no delusions that it would be a very easy journey. I secured my lifejacket and sealed myself in the little boat before paddling out into the open ocean.
Waves lifted and dropped and tossed me as soon as I was out of the boat house. They raised me so that I was atop a peak with the sky all around me, and I could see Seifer approach the flat island. They also dropped me into a valley of dark waters, disorienting and frightening.
As I shot through the mists, I could feel the mounting cold, even through my wetsuit.
Suddenly, I was taken back to a time when I was even smaller and the ship that took the other children back to Centra after visiting Fisherman's Horizon, where the Tilmits had decided to adopt me, shrank into the distance on choppy waves. That little boy's shock of blonde stuck out in the sea, stubbornly refusing to say goodbye when he found out I would not be returning with him, the last of us orphans, with Squall.
I remember waiting for the train. Waving frantically, screaming until I grew hoarse and my adoptive parents struggle to keep me from plunging into the depths to try to return to the only family I had ever really had. I just couldn't let him go like that, couldn't go from him like that.
But I did. I had to.
And golden-haired Seifer Almasy became a memory of warmth and beaches and brotherhood in frigid Trabia, where my absent adopters used me as a tax write off as they struggled to build their own businesses. I hated Trabia and I hated the change and I hated pretending that I didn't. But pretending made everyone else more at ease and sometimes even happy, and that made me happy, truly happy.
His memory faded with time and there was no warmth when we met again…
I'd traveled far when I came back the present. The water crashing all about roared in my ears and the webs of foam on the black tide ebbed and expanded with every second that passed by. Somehow the waves were taking me closer to the foreboding shore, which seemed to reach out to me with icy hands that grew wicked talons.
Out of nowhere the mists became bergs and I fought furiously to avoid them, though neither they nor I had any real direction or constancy. A tundra shore seemed to run out at me while I struggled to navigate the throngs of icebergs shuffling all around me.
A four meter chunk of one smashed into the right side of my hull, knocking me sideways. I was on my side, half underwater. The current shoved me past countless floating knives. One bit into my shoulder as I tried to roll back to the dry side of the waves, but kept getting pushed the other way and could not gain the momentum I needed to right myself.
I desperately stretched my neck to gulp down some air, but ended up swallowing more water and sputtered before turning completely upside down and underwater. Keeping my eyes open stung in the salt water and my shoulder hurt where the ice hit me, but I forced myself to be calm, even while bending over double to avoid another boulder of ice. Setting my paddle before me and using it as ballast, I spun with my core, hard to the left and managed to right the kayak and stay above water, coughing violently.
No sooner did I get about water than threw me out brutally and I landed on a mass of ice hard enough to knock the breath from me. Waves battered at my boat and nearly took me back into the open waters where I would surely be hammered by the frozen debris.
I frantically unfastened myself from the kayak and scrambled for purchase on a lilting and fracturing shore of rime. Kayak dragging behind me, I ran and jumped over the growing cracks and jetting boulders of ice, falling, being pelted, and slipping all the while.
Only when I made it to solid, ice-free but frozen, ground, did I stop to take a breath and take a look around me.
The waves surged over 10 meters high and buffeted the cold island with a deafening roar. The island itself seemed to grow and fight back at the tides, all sharp teeth and claws, with newly formed glaciers splitting and expanding in constant violence. I threw up few liters of seawater.
Unconsciously, I backed away, further into the island. I was shaking and not just from the cold.
Only, the roaring never died away.
I soon went back to my default method of dealing with how screwed up many situations in my life turned out to be: pretending they weren't. Opening my pack and finding that the water seal had held, I found some food and ate after doing my best to towel off, change, and throw on a SeeD parka before freezing. I was only partially successful.
Huge crystaline spires dotted the otherwise mostly flat island and I found, as I moved toward the center, that it was also littered with the remains of hundreds of monsters. I stepped over the shattered and dismembered remains of a Malboro and a few grendels, before realizing where I was, and that at some point, the roaring had changed from water to fire.
While a multitude of the fiends had frozen biers, still more were in blazing pyres.
And there he was in the middle of a world of ice and fire. All pristine white, red, ash, gold, he seemed a perfect king, or maybe god, of this beautiful, destroyed place. My brother.
"Seifer!"
He turned, halfway, to see me out of the corner of his eye.
I stopped, well short of him, but he beckoned me closer, and I came, looking all around.
"Why did you come here?" I asked.
"Told you I was going to hell."
"This is the Island Closest to Heaven," I corrected.
"Never did pay much attention in geography class…"
I sighed. "If you were anything like Irvine, you probably found Quistis' geography to be more interesting and couldn't be bothered to devote any thought to the real world's."
Seifer smirked.
"I'm not sure there's any difference for me anyway. Between heaven and hell, I mean."
I had no idea what he meant, but still had no desire to discuss the afterlife so soon after nearly being introduced to it. Did he even notice any of this? He strolled through the freezing detritus, flames, and carnage as though walking through a field of wildflowers. So did I, but I shivered.
"Did you do all this?"
He glanced at me; my teeth chattered even though I'd dried off.
"Much of it," he offered. "I thought you liked the cold," he muttered.
So he wasn't completely oblivious to everything around. I tried to skirt closer to the fires, but I could not seem to find a point of comfort. Everything was divided between a shocking cold and blistering heat.
I stayed over the hot side of the invisible lines as long as I could as frequently as I could.
"I hate the cold," I finally admitted, tantamount to saying my life was a lie. I guess it probably was.
"Mm," he grunted, as he stepped over the carcass of an emerald dragon. "Miss Trabia hates the cold. Why do you pretend to enjoy what you don't? Think it'll make everyone else happy? Think you can make warmth with just your sunny disposition?"
"Well… Yeah."
I'd felt that way for a long time. That I could, and I learned I could, truly, be so able to fake being happy that others became happy, and then I would be truly happy.
"Think you're so good at it that no one will ever discover that you're a phony, that you won't hurt someone when they discover the truth?" There was a hard, sharp edge to his voice I wasn't accustomed to hearing. He walked up to nearly frozen adamantoise, slammed Hyperion into the socket of its neck, and levered the whole thing open like a clam.
I turned away, tears turning to salt and ice on my cheeks. The argument I'd given myself for nearly a decade ran from Seifer, knowing it was too flimsy, because sometimes seeing others happy didn't make me happy so that it all worked out. It wasn't a self-fulfilling prophesy, just a ruse that sometimes fooled others into fooling myself. Maybe I just made everyone else fake it too. Maybe that was why ultimately, I was alone.
Trying desperately not to weep as he turned around to come back for me, I fell to the ground, hardly able to move.
He sighed a heavy sigh and I felt him remove my pack to set it under my head.
"I'm too cold, Seifer."
"You can't make warmth on your own," he said, in a milder voice, and I felt his coat come around me, a big pocket of heat enveloping me.
Didn't I know it. Nobody can make warmth on their own.
It always escapes when you're alone and it leaves you colder than before.