sixteen.
He isn't dead, and that's a shock.
It shouldn't be, really, as they struggle their way up the beach, toward the gunfire, the war, that ancient battle between good and evil, but hell if Seifer could tell you who was on what side anymore. Seifer's survived many things, most of them stupid, reckless, idiotic. Almost all of them, in fact. He's gotten really good at that bit, hasn't he?
(too old for this shit)
It makes sense that he'd survive this, too, their little hop-skip-jump through time and space.
His chest hurts. His hand spiders up, pushes against his skin, tries to massage it back into a regular beat.
"I need to-" he starts. (What? Stop? There is no stopping now, not when they've come this far.) He has survived so many things, and yet the distance between them and safety (if Garden can even be called that), is insurmountable. Seifer stops, boots sinking into the sand. "I can't-"
"Yes, you can."
Quistis shifts herself beneath his arm, taking on more of his weight, dragging him halfway up the last dune. Garden sits high on the hill, watching, watching, and when the beach betrays him, sends him pitching to his knees, Seifer thinks that this is the cruelest fucking joke of them all.
So close, so far.
"Seifer-" His name is close to a beg from her lips, and he meets Quistis' eyes again, tracing the whorls of blue on her skin, brilliant and unmissable now, no more makeup, no more hiding, and she may be a witch, but, dammit, she is his witch, and he will tear the world to shreds for her.
All she has to do is ask. And maybe hit him with a cure or something.
"Do it," he tells her, instead of whatever it was that he was going to say, and he braces himself instinctively for the warmth of her hands against his skin, for the sear of the power she pushes into him. Do it.
He feels like he's coming apart at the seams.
It occurs to him that he doesn't actually want to die today.
xx
She pushes. That is the best word for it, for the way she manipulates her magic, gathering it up and shoving it into Seifer's core as if brute strength can make up for lack of skill. She's been a blue mage all her life, and yet this is foreign, ancient stuff every time she touches it, careful funneling and fueling and sorting of the paramagic system a cakewalk compared to the raw power that lives in her now.
They'll burn me like a witch, he'd said to her once, a smirk on his lips and the faintest beat of a joke behind it, and she knows it's what she has become.
She is a witch, he is her knight, this is their eternity now.
Quistis pushes, pushes, pushes.
Seifer comes back to her by great degrees, face losing some of its grey pallor, the rattle in his chest muffled by the force of her magic. She would do anything to save him, anything at all.
iloveyou, screamed in the maw between them, iloveyou.
He opens his mouth to speak, a hand reaching out to touch her face again, to memorize this new, unfamiliar her beneath the callused pads of his fingertips, and it is his gaze that breaks away first, shoving her down, away.
Quistis doesn't need to look to know what's so dangerous. She feels it like a chainsaw-metal screech in her bones.
xx
Rinoa, Rinoa, something (w-i-c-k-e-d) this way comes.
She is trailing blood, she realizes distantly, walking through the war, feeling it sticky-hot between her thighs.
Sacrifices must be made.
(There's a little man in a colorless robe, walking across a lotus pond, his smile beatific and his teeth sharp fangs. Hyne, the trickster god, the founder of us all. She dreams about him more often than she cares to admit, this mythic being, and she knows now who the voice belongs to, the one that sits at the back of her head and croons like a lover in her ear. Hyne, the maker, the unmaker, the monster-father and his daughters twisted-warped-creatures, all of them.)
Rinoa drip, drip, drips her blood trail along the cobblestones, across the narrow boardwalk, and she may well be invisible, for all the attention she receives. Sacrifices were made for all this power, and now it sits just out of reach, ten yards, nine, eight, seven.
Seifer is between her and her goal, and his hands are broad against her feather-light arms. Does he really think he will stop her, this pretender, this false knight?
tell her she's beautiful.
He can't even obey a simple command. No wonder he was cast off, discarded as rubbish. She looks at his hands, at his wrists, at his arms and his shoulders and his pulse beating drum-taut in his throat.
There are dreams in the back of his mind, distant, ancient ones, Timber and a summer and the way the sunlight played along bare skin, his kiss, his promises, the laugh she sought to elicit from him, that bright, beautiful one where his head cast back and his throat lay bare for anyone to c u t.
"You can't hurt me," she tells him, and when she hurls him across the open beach with a flick of a finger, there is only the tiniest hint of regret.
how dare he.
(no, no, no, screams the blue-draped girl, clawing at her own skin, no, no, no, don't hurt them.)
(hyne throws back his head and laughs.)
xx
He is four, the first time he recklessly leaps off of something without thinking of the consequences, and can picture Quistis' round, child's face as clearly as if it were yesterday, the brief shock of horror, the relief as he lands his small body amidst a nest of pillows someone had set up below.
But it is the in-between that Seifer remembers most, the climbing up to the top bunk, the surveying of his kingdom below, a towel tied like a cape around his neck. It's a game.
I want to fly.
He jumps out into the openness, hurtling toward the floor, and it's only after the impact among soft pillows and stuffed animals, when Quistis is lecturing him about how badly he could have hurt himself, this girl who's just a stranger, just some bossy nobody, that Seifer realizes the implications of what he's done.
He is no longer four, and he is flying, and hits the ground against his weaker shoulder hard, absorbing the impact with a grunt. Not nearly as soft as pillows, but it could have been worse. She could have thrown him into a tree.
I'm real fucking tired of people trying to kill me.
Sand explodes around him. He scrambles to his feet, hurls himself back into the fray. There's a knife in his boot, ripped out, flipped around in his hand, and thrown.
There's a knife in his hand, and then there is not.
xx
Ifrit settles, kneads his claws into Squall's brain, feasts upon a memory (a childhood birthday party by the Centran sea, and he is either five or six, but it doesn't matter, because he'll never think of it again). It is a moment before Squall's clarity returns, and he turns toward where his wife is standing.
"Rinoa, I need you to-"
She's gone, gone, gone, and there is only a comma-smear of blood on the tile to indicate that she was ever there at all.