twelve
Something is different when she opens her eyes. Things are clearer, sharper... more there than they were when she went to sleep a couple of hours ago.
Rinoa straightens up in the recliner she had fallen asleep in, raising a hand to her eyes, rubbing out sleep crud out of the left, then the right. Her nap seems to have alleviated most of her nausea, for now, at least. That is a pleasant surprise.
There is a glint of silver on the table next to her, and Rinoa turns, carefully, feeling like the world is fresh, new-made, and it makes her a little dizzy. The shine turns out to be a fat silver bracelet, one she recognizes as Squall's present to her from a trip to Timber years and years ago.
There is a pristine square of palace stationary tucked beneath it.
Wear this.
Squall's handwriting is a scrawl, loose, fast, as if he can't bear to waste time properly forming letters. Rinoa picks up the bangle, and something about the movement makes her stop. There is no whisper of metal against her own skin.
She stretches her arm out in front of her, studying it carefully. Her wrist is bare. The Odine bangle is gone, leaving little more evidence that it was ever there than just a pale circle of skin.
Laughter burbles up from within her, and spills over her lips before she can quite control it.
-the scratching of metal against metal, the grunt of a man's voice, the feeling of peace and freedom and rinoarinoarinoa-
She slips the untrue bangle on her wrist and chases the sound of a heartbeat, her name, his voice, out of the room, down the stairs.
xx
Xu stares at her computer screen for a very long time before she can even quite process what she's seeing. The photos are crisply rendered, perfectly centered, and the woman's face that stares at her from them is not Rinoa Heartilly, no matter what the accompanying letter might claim.
She has spent too many hours in company with this face, and not so long ago, she would claim she knew it better than her own.
The words are stark black text that mock her- we have your sorceress, we will kill her. There is a list of demands, standard ones, money, power, a formal apology by SeeD for wrongs done to people she doesn't remember, names that mean absolutely nothing to her.
It doesn't matter. Someone, someone does not know the difference between Rinoa Heartilly and Quistis Trepe- Xu would tear down Galbadia brick by brick for only one of them.
She is up and hobbling out of her office, her phone out, and completely ignores the diplomatic emissary from Trabia sitting in the waiting room as she jabs her thumb against the call button for the elevator repeatedly.
Somewhere above the grinding clatter of the elevator, the emissary's insistent request that they must talk, right now, Xu is aware that her phone is ringing. When she looks down at the display, Leonhart, Squall is calling her.
xx
She startles the shit out of him, appearing like a ghost.
"Squall," she says, and he jerks his head up, slamming it against the bottom of the steering column. The motion is enough to get a spark going in the wires in his hands, and the engine roars to life.
He twists himself upright in the seat, rubbing his head. His wife is sitting next to him; he hadn't even heard the door open, but here she is, in a soft printed-cotton sundress and her hair in long, loose waves around her face. Her hands are folded in her lap, below the bump of her belly, and when she speaks, her voice is urgent.
"You're not going alone."
Somewhere in the presidential palace, a klaxon goes off, blaring through the corridors and right down to the garage. That would be Kiros, then, noticing for the first time that the lockbox he keeps not-so-cleverly hidden in his desk has been picked open, that the special key for the Odine bangle is missing, and burns white-hot-cold in Squall's pocket now.
There is no time to argue, because here comes Kiros now, loping around the corner, his eyes narrowed as he scans the garage for the source of the engine idle.
"Squall!" he shouts, jogging . "You don't want to do this. Get out of the car. We can take care of this-"
Not an option, Squall thinks, throwing the car into gear and peeling backwards out of the parking space, narrowly avoiding running into the tail of a massive sport utility vehicle. The sedan he has chosen to steal will not handle even a minor impact very well, but it is the least flashy of Laguna's vehicles.
It is also, perhaps, one of the only cars in the garage that can get them to Balamb with the least amount of fuel.
Security is pouring into the garage behind Kiros, guns drawn and yelling for him to stop, stop right now, or we'll shoot.
(He has flashbacks of a silver car and a screaming crowd.)
A shot goes off, clipping a concrete pillar to the right, and he instinctively puts his hand on Rinoa's head, pushing her down low in the seat, away from the danger. Someone's going to get fired, shooting at the president's son.
He doesn't let Rinoa sit up until they are clear of the palace, when he finds a bit of late afternoon traffic to lose themselves in. It'll buy them a few minutes, maybe, while the security teams scramble for their cars, and someone reports the situation to his father.
There are sirens behind them now. Squall weaves the car in and out of lanes with a flagrant disregard for his turn signal and the posted speed limit- he has the car at a hundred miles per hour by the time they reach the toll booths out of Esthar. The automated system picks up on the fact that it's a political vehicle before it picks up on the fact that it's a stolen political vehicle, and the light above the gate flicks to green, allowing them passage.
"Xu knows we're coming," Rinoa says finally, and there is nothing in her voice to define the statement- it is a fact she has plucked out of the air, out of his mind. She knows of the thirty-second phone call, placed to the most powerful woman in the private mercenary business right now. Xu knows he is coming, yes.
Rinoa, however, is a secret kept, while he announces his intentions to the rest of the world.
He returns his attention to the road, because concentrating on driving means he doesn't have to think too hard about what going home will mean for them.
xx
(Careful, careful now.)
They have left her alone for hours now, but the mad-scientist captor is back, her white labcoat pristine, bright and hard to look straight at. Someone has adjusted whatever is running through the line, just enough that coherent thought is starting to seep back in, and Quistis watches, waits. She has had practice at this, many hours spent being pumped full of truth serums and sedatives, but this drug... This is hard to beat.
"You killed my sister," the woman says conversationally. "Back during the Second War, when you went nuts once. You probably don't remember her. Your pretty husband called it all a tactical error afterward. That they were deeply sorry, but there was nothing they could do."
The woman reaches forward, her fingers outstretched, touching Quistis' face analytically. She picks up clumps of dyed-dark hair, drops them back against Quistis' shoulder. There are stinging pains when clinical fingers brush across open wounds, injuries Quistis wasn't even aware of having. Someone might as well have poured straight rubbing alcohol into them now, as they are brought into sharp relief.
"He said, and I remember this distinctly, 'that there was a war going on,' as if it were news to anyone." There is a bitter, cynical laugh. "As if that's news to anyone now. There's always a war on."
-startlingly clear image of that press conference, back when they were young and full of idealism and thought they could save the world-
The woman moves her fingers down, down. Quistis' head flicks forward like a snakebite, sinking her teeth into an inch of exposed skin between sleeve and palm.
The woman's scream goes on forever-ever-ever, and she hangs on like a dog to a bone, blood filling her mouth, copper-hot. Her prey is still screaming, yanking at her arm, tearing more flesh free with every pull, and Qusitis shakes her head, just a bit, to the left. This stranger, her captor, stumbles into the intravenous line and the needle rips out of Quistis' wrist.
There is pain, and it is an afterthought, a sensation trying to muddle up through the salty taste of human skin and blood, chasing after the drug still running cold through her veins.
xx
The scene in Balamb Garden's hastily-rebuilt Securities center is ripped out of every spy thriller. People are everywhere, crammed shoulder to shoulder at computer terminals, basked in the blue glow of monitors, calling instructions and coordinates across the room. There is a situation in Timber right now, a mission gone awry that has left most of a SeeD team clinging to survival by their fingernails until the calvary arrives. Xu has read over most of the report.
It doesn't matter.
She strongarms one of her soldiers into a full-stop, the man stumbling against her arm and then recovering enough to salute her with a hasty, "Ma'am?"
"Activate Quistis Trepe's beacon," Xu says, ignoring his stammering. "Forward the details to my datapad. I want them in two minutes."
"But, Timber-"
"I don't believe I stuttered," she tells him coldly. "Two minutes."
She is halfway back down the hall when her datapad beeps with a new message. The beacon shows the warehouse district of Deling City, near the northern outskirts. When she zooms in on the map, it gives her a four-block radius and nothing closer. All of the buildings look identical, gray towers with too many windows.
Before Xu can think too terribly hard about what she's doing or why, she forwards the message to Almasy, Seifer, and closes out of her email program.
xx
The cell door clangs open, and they are no longer alone.
Quistis is aware of three figures before there is a blinding lens-flare of white in her right eye, someone slamming their fist into the side of her head, and her jaw relaxes for just a half-second in shock. It is enough for the woman to yank her arm free, and Quistis spits a chunk of skin, a mouthful of blood and sinew onto the concrete floor. The impact has cleared something in her head, some of the ballast keeping her tethered.
Deep in her chest, something surges up, up, up, up, and she rips her arms up, tearing through nylon weave that by all rights she shouldn't be able to ruin, but there is a siren-scream in her head and a pounding in her veins and she lunges.
There is tearing and screaming and an eyeball rolling across the floor. Blood drips in her eyes, and she smears it away with the back of her hand, turning the movement into a backhand that results in the crunching of cartilage as she breaks someone's nose.
The woman is scrambling across the room, clutching her ruined arm, and Quistis grabs her, shoving her against the flat steel of the prison walls.
"My name," she hisses, her lips centimeters from the woman's ear, "is Quistis Trepe."
It takes only seven pounds of pressure to break a person's neck, but she silences the doctor's high keening begging wail with far more force than that, until her captor's eyes are staring blankly at the wall behind her. Quistis drops the corpse; there is the sticky feeling of blood under her toes as she slips out of the open cell door, leaving ruin in her wake and a screaming headache rattling in her skull.
(Good.)
There is that rustling noise behind her again as she walks, and Quistis reaches back over her shoulder. She finds only empty air, but when she touches her shoulderblade, her fingers come away smeared with red.