ten
It took Galbadia exactly four days to declare war on Balamb Garden, and Squall still cannot reconcile with the fact that, now, weeks later, what he is watching on the television is, in fact, the sleepy peaceful town of Balamb, burning.
It is the image that haunts him even as Laguna turns off the television, the flames lingering behind his eyes like the flashburn of a camera flare. He will never be able to un-see this. He will-
"Squall-"
It is his father's choked voice that makes Squall realize that the edge of Laguna's desk has come away in pieces under his white-knuckled hands. He stares down at the hunk of lacquered wood and, somewhere, numbly, feels the sting of rough edges biting into his skin.
Balamb is burning, and he isn't there, he can't save it.
He should be in black leather, whirling like a dervish among Galbadian soldiers, separating limbs from bodies, poison-fused bullets decimating men's torsos in ways that he has carefully schooled himself out of remembering. He should be spattered with gore and sweat and in a wheeling dance with the enemy.
Instead, people are dying. Ma Dincht might be dead. Zell is probably out there, hurling himself into the fray, a man possessed regardless of his honorable discharge, the very carefully crafted terms of his contract allowing him to be drawn back into battle at any time, one good hand or not.
They will need all available bodies to the front line.
He should be there.
"Squall," his father says again, and he wonders just how long Laguna has been repeating that word. He looks up, to a point just over the president's shoulder, at the peaceful skyline of Esthar.
Seifer and Quistis are undoubtedly somewhere in the middle of the bloodshed, escaped to Deling City under the pretense of leave time.
-he has a perfectly clear mental image of Quistis ripping out a man's throat with her bare hands, pretty, pristine nails grabbing hold of taut vocal cords and silencing a scream that would've gotten them all caught if anyone had heard the alarm-
Instead, he is here, in a stupid ill-fitting suit because Laguna has asked him to take over some security responsibilities, just for something to pass the goddamned time. The knot in his tie is a noose- Squall tears at it, fumbling with the loops of cloth until he has it free, yanking it off from around his collar and flinging it onto the ground.
"I need to go home," he says, and his voice is hollow.
"You can't," Laguna tells him, and who is this man, this absentee father he has only barely begun to trust, and only because of a stupid war that was started just like this one, with a sorceress and a princess and a band of soldiers.
He sets the fragment of wood onto a less damaged part of the desk. "I need to go there," he repeats, carefully, like he is talking to a child. There is something horrible thudding in his ears, a whistling scream of a missile blast that will, if he's lucky, leave him dead where he stands.
It takes him a moment to realize that it's his heart, hammering wildly out of control, just like the afterimage of Balamb on fire.
"You have to stay here. For Rinoa's sake. For your child's sake," Laguna implores, and maybe on a man not bred as a soldier from day one of what life he can remember, this argument would work.
"I have to go." His heartbeat is so loud, he has to shout to be heard over it.
Laguna rises halfway out of his seat, and his tone is begging. "I don't know if I can protect her if you leave, Squall."
But he is already standing, crashing the chair he has been sitting in back against the floor. Kiros and Ward rush in at the commotion, and Squall shoves past them.
He has to go home.
xx
The streets are emptying out, Quistis realizes with a start, just as it begins to rain. When she'd left the hotel, the sidewalks were much more crowded than she had expected. She thought everyone would be hiding out in their homes, not going about their business.
Quistis stops mid-stride, squinting up through her rain streaked glasses at the street signs. She's been walking for a long time, ignored by the people all around her, not paying much attention to the twists and turns she has taken, shortcuts through alleyways, crossing through neighborhoods that only seem to get more derelict as she walks.
And now she has no idea where she is. Great. She ducks underneath the overhang of a shop with its Closed sign already flickering in the window.
This has been happening a lot lately, these absent slips, where she doesn't know what happened to minutes or hours or days. She blames the sleep, the long endless oh god wake up Quistis hours that she spends with her eyes shut, and the even longer days, where reality shifts and bends and she can spend thirty minutes staring into the micro fridge in their hotel suite and not remember why she opened the door.
How long has she been out here, anyway?
Quistis digs in her pocket for her phone, and comes up empty, swearing under her breath when she discovers that she is entirely without wallet, phone or key.
Or weapons, but, really, that isn't a problem anymore.
She closes her eyes, and reaches, seeking out the persistent thud-thud that is Seifer Almasy's heartbeat, the only thing she knows, the only thing that is constant now.
She has never tried to find him from this far away. There has never been a reason. She supposes she could go into any number of little cafes and bodegas, pick up a pay phone and dial a number she knows by heart, but it brings her back to the part where she has left her wallet like a stupid, amateur rookie in their hotel room, when a quick foray into her pockets has her coming up only with lint.
She furrows her brow, only distantly aware of how she must look, leaning against this rotting hulk of a building with her eyes closed (just another crazy person in a crazy city), when the taser hits her in the chest.
She sees a galaxy exploding behind her eyes, and as she drops, she can hear the faint thrum of Seifer's heart, and the sound swells and grows and expands until it is louder than the electricity buzzing through her body, louder than the shocked cries of onlookers as she drops, louder than the voices around her, pick her up, get her out of here, and she is spasming and twitching and the heartbeat explodes into nothing.
xx
Something is wrong here. Seifer knows it before he even slides the card key in the lock.
Quistis' things are still sitting in a neat pile on the table by the door, her fake wallet with her fake ID, her room key, her heavily encrypted phone that looks exactly like every other phone on the planet except for the fact that she can call the highest levels of Garden and never be traced.
She isn't here.
His stomach drops.
The bedroom is empty, but he checks it anyway, ripping away the balled up comforter just in case she has squeezed herself somewhere down beneath it, blocking out the whole damn world with a floral-print shield.
Seifer comes up empty-handed, and it feels like his heart is trying to make an escape out of his throat.
She's gone.
He hits the hallway at a dead run.
xx
wake-up-wake-up-wake-up little quistis trepe.
She sees fire and brimstone and the beach of her childhood,
gulls freewheeling overhead, screaming out their taunts to
the end of the day. She sees a blond boy with bright green
eyes, who kicks over a sandcastle a blonde girl has spent so
many hours carefully constructing. She sees the boy grow
into a man, sees the man shift into a lap dog, sees the lap
dog turn into a shell of a man that comes to her without
a valid reason on his lips, a man she can barely touch
and then cannot live without, and she sees the shell
slowly fill back up with life and she hates him for it.
wake-up-wake-UP, little quistis trepe, because this is reality and the dream is something you've been living for far too long.
no, she doesn't hate him, she can't hate him, she
has never hated him, not even when he broke her
nose or when she wrapped Save the Queen around
his leg, leaving a leather burned and barbed scar in his
flesh. she cannot hate him. she will not hate him.
this is the monster in her head, she knows, the
one that waits underneath her skin and whose
claws and teeth go snicker-snack.
WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP, don't you remember me?
and behind the golden halo of seifer's hair, she can
see the witch that wears her mother's face.
WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP.
xx
"NO!" The scream comes tearing out of her lips, spittle flying out and caking around her chin, and Quistis Trepe opens her eyes to the red-tinged world of a microscopic prison cell.