four
Amidst the din of the restaurant, they sit in silence.
Rinoa fiddles with her fork, flipping it over and over again. Laguna sips from his glass of wine. Squall tugs at the sleeves of his borrowed dinner jacket, ignoring everyone, trying to make the fabric long enough to go past his wrists. It is a relief when the food finally shows up, and the waiter deposits plates in front of them. Small talk has been attempted once, then aborted.
"More wine?" the waiter asks the president, and Laguna nods. Rinoa raises her hand as well, indicating that she, too, needs a refill. The waiter turns his attention to Squall. "Another beer, sir?"
Squall nods once. The waiter leaves.
Silence is broken up by the clinking of silverware against plates, the sounds of eating, drinking once the beverages are dispensed.
"Not bad," Laguna comments, and Squall shrugs.
"I guess."
Laguna swallows another mouthful of wine. "I know you guys would've rather stayed in. I'm sorry. We could've ordered pizza or something."
"It's not a big deal, Laguna. We're just tired. It's been a long day." Rinoa pushes the peas around on her plate with her fork. The bangle clinks against the plate- she's paired it with a wide silver bracelet, so it looks like little more than jewelry. "It's a great restaurant. Thank you."
Squall can feel the faint echoes of her irritation at him when he doesn't say anything. He doesn't look at her. "Yeah, thanks."
It's surprising how easy it is to appease Laguna. His father smiles and turns his attention back to his steak. Squall takes a deep pull of his beer. It's good, a Galbadian brew, an old favorite of a long-gone friend.
Rinoa reaches across the table and squeezes Squall's hand. "Eat," she orders him gently, so he stabs his fork into a bit of mushroom and does. He's always been good at following orders.
xx
Her reflection is someone she does not know.
Quistis stares in the bathroom mirror, examining the woman looking back at her critically. Blonde hair, loose around her face- she yanks it back and turns her head from side to side. Coming back from nowhere (from death, she is reminded) has left her with faint blue streaks across her cheeks, like remnants of exposure that have not gone away, a pale parody of the veins on Edea's skin during her possession.
The marks are changing, though. The lines are edged with a darker blue, more pronounced, stark against her pale skin. Her eyes are rimmed in it, like she has gone to town with eyeliner.
"It doesn't matter," she tells her reflection sternly. "This doesn't mean you're going crazy."
This doesn't mean you're going to compress time, doesn't mean you're going to destroy the world and everyone you love. This doesn't mean that at all.
Quistis rips open the medicine cabinet and pulls out her makeup bag. She's halfway done applying her foundation when Seifer opens the door to the bathroom.
"Don't you knock?" she asks irritably, pressing her brush into the compact and working on the left side of her face. She has a boat to catch in an hour, a mission to Centra, and this is wasting time she does not have to spare.
"How long have we known each other?" He leans against the door frame, all long limbs and smooth angles, his arms crossed as he studies her. "What are you going to do about that?"
"Nothing." She plucks out a bottle of eyeliner, dark brown, and draws it over the lines around her eyes carefully.
"It's getting worse."
"Yes. I know that. Thanks."
"Are you going to tell Xu?"
"No." Quistis twists the lid on the eyeliner tightly, too tightly- the tiny plastic bottle cracks and spatters brown makeup all over her hands and the sink. "Shit," she swears, dropping the bottle, wrenching on the tap. The makeup comes off her hands in globs, leaving the white porcelain streaked with brown.
From somewhere in the bedroom, her cell phone rings. Quistis does a hasty job on the rest of the eyeliner. "Did you use the last towel?"
He shrugs. "Yeah, probably."
Quistis runs her hands down the front of his t-shirt and ducks out of the bathroom as he swats at her. His annoyance thrums through her, threaded with amusement, and something she cannot quite name.
It baffles her, this link, this knowledge of every part of him. She doesn't have time to dwell on the fact, though, and snatches her phone off of the table. "Trepe."
"You've been contracted to Deling instead," Xu says by way of greeting. "Presidential guard duty."
"Alright. Seifer, too?"
"No. Just you. There's a plane leaving in twenty minutes."
Quistis hangs up. "I have to go, she says. "Deling City."
Seifer nods. To his credit, he doesn't ask her if she's okay, even though she can feel it running through him. She was only out for a minute, not enough to even justify a trip to the infirmary. A couple of aspirin, a few hours spent napping, and she's fine. It's just stress. Just the shock of-
"How long?"
-knowing everything-
"I don't know. I'll call you when I find out." She pockets her phone and heads back into the bathroom, stuffing her toothbrush and her contacts into her travel case. Her hair is a lost cause, and so she simply yanks it back into a ponytail. The frames of her glasses distract from the fact that she's wearing too much makeup.
Packing takes even less time- she brings the same bag for every mission. Two pairs of pants, two shirts, things she can wash in sinks. She dresses quickly, black pants, white blouse, black jacket. The official uniform of the hired guard. Her boots are expensive, elegantly designed, steel-toed. She zips the soft leather closed, wiggling her toes to get a feel for the boots. The jacket is cut smoothly enough to loop Save the Queen on her belt and not have it be obvious. No matter what, she is always her most comfortable armed.
"Have fun," Seifer says, and when she kisses him goodbye, she tastes a thread of worry and the thudding of his heartbeat.
xx
Balamb Garden's gym isn't exactly humming with activity at three thirty in the morning, so Seifer takes the liberty of popping the lock on the maintenance room door and wiring his music player directly into the sound system. It doesn't take much work, and within a minute, he has the gym booming with some classic rock from an old band in Timber.
Quistis' lousy sleep habits and late-night missions have left him too wired to go back to bed. The track stretches around the room, a quarter mile of smooth rubber that's generally only used when the weather sucks, and Seifer stretches his arms over his head as he walks toward the marked starting line, feeling his muscles loosen. He pauses, pulls his legs up one at a time. His knees pop, something they wouldn't have done seven years ago. Maybe he's getting too old for this shit.
He starts running, falling in time with the beat of the music, not pushing anything. He's been thinking about that a lot, lately, getting older.
If the history books are true, Quistis will outlive him by a wide margin.
Maybe it's time to retire. Coming back to SeeD wasn't exactly a choice, and now that Puberty Boy's out for good, Seifer doesn't know if he cares to stay around much longer under Xu's tyrannical rule. Most SeeDs are out by thirty, anyway, if they're not dead.
Lap two, and track two, a screaming heavy-metal band that Raijin introduced him to, music Quistis hates.
Out by thirty. He's almost twenty-eight.
Seifer runs.
His girlfriend's a sorceress.
Seifer runs.
Something's going to give.
Seifer runs. Lap three, lap four, lap five.
He wonders what Quistis would say if he asked- hey, you wanna go buy a house in the suburbs and have two and a half kids?
It never works out like that.
The song builds, reaching its boiling, screaming climax. He runs, runs, pushing himself now, heading for the line, the rubber surface of the track giving under his shoes and propelling him forward, so much easier than running on sand.
She'd probably want to get married or something crazy.
He propels his body forward, faster, faster, c'mon, man, records to beat, reasons to gloat. You're not that old.
His faded blue trainers hit the starting line.
There's a discord in the song, a searing shriek he doesn't remember, and suddenly, he is flying through the air as the wall of the gym explodes behind him.
(It's not the falling that's scary, it's knowing how painful the impact is going to be.)
The ground rushes up to meet him, and he twists himself, presenting as small a target as he can manage, but the pain is blinding when his shoulder meets the ground, a white-hot explosion, worse than being shot at, being sliced with Lionheart, a thousand times worse than Save the Queen's barbs embedding into his skin. The hard tile of the gym floor is not as forgiving as the track.
He lays there, gasping, his good arm thrown over his head, shielding his face from the rubber and debris that rains down around him.
Should've retired when Xu took over.
Distantly, he knows this is a ridiculous thought to have, but the idea is drowned out by another explosion, somewhere far away, in a different part of Garden.