For Rinoa, it was if she had awakened into the same nightmare that haunted her sleep. There were the fields under a stormy sky, and Squall was pulling her through them. The fact that everything now existed in blurry, indistinct shapes while in her dreams the landscape bore a cold, impossible clarity allowed her to distinguish the two; but it didn't matter. Asleep or awake, she was a spectator in her own life, who could not move or speak or barely think.
In the waking life, there were trees here and there; sometimes the sun was screened by a canopy of leaves yet still managed to glare into her eyes, while sometimes there was nothing to block the sun at all. There was thunder, but since the sun never dimmed she could not be sure if it was real or imagined; she thought she saw clouds racing away and then rolling back as a thick fog that obscured her vision but not the glare of the sun. And all through it, Squall carried her forward, towards what end she did not know.
Then he would stop, and she would drift into sleep. In the new dream, she was lying on her side under a sky of rippling mercury, as a tornado of feathers descended around her. They were white at first, but would become singed and black as ash once they came to rest about her, and she could feel the heat drying out her body as well. Whenever one of the feathers would touch her skin, the heat would become unbearable, but she was too weak to scream or make any move beyond a tiny flinch. Squall stood in front of her, gunblade in hand and standing as a sentry, always with his back to her, always telling her how sorry he was for not protecting her before and promising to safeguard her from all danger henceforth. Another searing feather would land on her with each promise, until the pain exploded, the mercury clouds would roll away before a cold, blue sky, and she would be awake again, with the real Squall hauling her onward and the sun glaring in the corner of her eye.
The dreams might be a great deal clearer than the waking world, but the whole of their reality was pain. There was no real pain when she was awake, only a dull ache throughout her body and an unpleasant throbbing in her skull. Maybe this meant that she had her labels wrong, and her dreams were the reality; but it didn't really seem to matter, as she was utterly helpless in each.
Time was an impossible thing to measure under circumstances such as this. For all she knew, years had passed with her in this state; since she could not remember how long a year was, this seemed reasonable enough. Indeed, she could only vaguely remember a time when she had not been simply shifting between delirium and dream, nor had she any idea what had brought her to this state. Her past was all a blur, and she lacked any concept of future.
The one constant was Squall. She remembered him, though she could not recite much of his biography — matters such as his age or what he did were unimportant; the feeling that she knew him was there, and that was enough to separate him from the surreality that encompassed the rest of her world.
But Squall was also always out of reach. She could not communicate with him, or influence his actions in any way, even though all of his actions seemed to relate back to her. Awake or in the dream, Rinoa could not make Squall hear her, and was still powerless with her fate in his hands.
Once, when Squall had paused in carrying her, she found herself on the ground but not in the dream, staring instead at the blurry sun through the indistinct trees and Squall's unclear form sitting not far away. She felt energy flowing through the earth, magical water that ached like fire. The words 'draw point' didn't come to her mind, but she knew what it was nonetheless. Within Squall, she could recognize the power of his GF and the magic residing in his mind, the energy flowing through and surrounding his body; though her eyes could not focus on his physical form, she felt as if she were seeing into another reality, one deeper than any other human could understand. This, she thought, was perhaps why Squall didn't respond to her; she couldn't communicate in his world anymore, and he couldn't comprehend this new one that was hers.
Such thoughts then faded, as the dream and its familiar pain retook her consciousness, as cold and painful as ever. And the cycle went on.
After nearly twenty years, the Timber forests had only begun to recover from the devastation of the Galbadian invasion. The trees existed in sparse patches among wide fields where dead stumps had been reclaimed by the grass. Squall had meant to use these woods for shelter, but in this state they provided little; more often than not he was trekking through an open field, visible to anyone who had a decent pair of binoculars, or even fairly good eyesight. He used the patches of trees to set Rinoa down and rest himself; either she was getting heavier or he more tired, but the task of carrying her onward was becoming harder.
He was getting hungry again. Really, he hadn't stopped being hungry in days, but now the hunger had developed from a somewhat discomforting gurgle in his stomach to a dull ache that threatened to cause real pain. He was beginning to evaluate the nutritional merits of the local vegetation, but even if he could be sure that the leaves and plants around him weren't poisonous, none of them seemed particularly filling anyway.
Sometimes, Rinoa looked like she might be regaining consciousness; she would moan softly, slowly rolling over, and sometimes Squall thought she might even be looking at him. But she was clearly delirious; Squall had no idea if she could see anything at all. He wished he knew more about medicine, or what the doctor had done to leave her like this, so that he could have some idea how to help her; but all he could do was keep her away from the Galbadians and hope she would recover on her own.
He thought he could see the tops of the Timber skyline on the horizon through the patch of trees, off to the northeast. Getting too close to the city posed its own dangers, he knew, but he needed to keep his options open; if it were at all possible to venture into the city for supplies, he would have to do so. Squall had not eaten a decent meal in three days, and Rinoa in even longer, so he doubted any plant he found could prove sufficient for long.
It gradually dawned on Squall that it had been nearly three days since he had fought his way out of Battleship Island. So far, he hadn't had much reason to keep track of time — which wasn't a completely unfamiliar feeling; he still did not know how many days and nights he had spent trekking across the Horizon Bridge to Esthar with Rinoa on his back. It would be nice to say that he'd had more important things on his mind, but really he had not been thinking about much of anything, then or now. Both times, his mind focused on Rinoa, and what he had to do to make her better, even though he didn't know the answer. He tried not to think about the decisions he had made, especially this time around; self-doubt couldn't help either of them right now.
On the Horizon Bridge, Squall had known his destination, even if what would happen when he got there was an open question. Now, he had no destination, but could guess what would happen at any number of locations were he to go there. He had been resting for a particularly long time now, in part because he had no idea which way to go when he picked Rinoa up again. He was getting close to Timber, but behind him the Galbadians could well have found his abandoned car by now. Should he be looking for someplace to hide? If he could sneak into Timber, he might be able to catch a train to the desert or to Dollet, someplace farther away from the manhunt that was certainly following him. But Timber, as far as he knew, was still under martial law, and he did not like his chances of passing through unseen. Perhaps he should find the highway again and commandeer somebody's vehicle; he still had his gunblade and magic, so all he had to do was get someone to stop before the police or military came by.
There was someone watching him.
This last realization came to Squall fairly slowly. The signs were faint; whoever it was clearly had a good sense for the woods and was practiced in the art of not being seen. It wasn't clear to him what tipped him off: a shadow where it shouldn't be, or some noise of footsteps, or one of the inexplicable senses of the GF; but he became certain that there was another human nearby, somewhere off to his right where the trees were thicker. His hand drifted toward his gunblade as he carefully surveyed his surroundings for any other signs of people lurking about, perhaps some trap waiting to be sprung; but all he could sense was one solitary form.
His instinct was to approach and challenge the person, but he could not leave Rinoa even if no one else seemed to be around. If the person were a Galbadian agent, however, he didn't want to bring Rinoa right to them, either. Both options seemed to put her in as much danger as doing nothing would.
Kneeling down, he gently nudged Rinoa, quixotically hoping that she might regain consciousness and somehow be able to help him out of this predicament. "Rinoa?" he asked. "There's someone out here. I don't know who it is, but I could use your help." She moaned, rolled slightly away from him and murmured something Squall couldn't understand, but showed no signs of approaching lucidity. Squall sighed; he hadn't really expected better results, but Rinoa's state was troubling enough when there was no immediate danger as well.
Resolving to find someplace where Rinoa could be kept out of sight somehow, Squall picked her up again and set off at an angle away from the observer, who followed them at a distance. Since whoever it was could apparently track him through the trees and brush, Squall soon determined that hiding Rinoa would be conditional on killing or incapacitating whoever it was, which would rather eliminate the need to hide her anyway, since there was no one else around. Concluding, then, that the best solution lay in confrontation after all, he turned to find a way to catch the pursuer and strike.
He was still working out how to do this with Rinoa still carried on his back when he realized that the pursuer was now closing on him as well. Stopping in his tracks, he carefully set Rinoa down against a tree at the edge of a small clearing so she would be invisible to the person who was approaching from beyond the other side of it. He advanced into the clearing then, not putting more than two meters between himself and where Rinoa lay and directing nearly as much attention behind him as he did ahead. His gunblade was up and ready.
The other figure stepped out a few tense moments later, showing no interest in stealth. Squall, who had been ready to demand the person's identity and purpose in the woods, instead stared speechless at the new arrival – whose own gunblade remained in its holster at his side.
"Hey, Squall," said Seifer, with a characteristically casual manner as he strode to the center of the clearing. "How's it going?"