eighteen.
i
will
never
let
you
forget
about
me.
xx
She sets her hand in Quistis', gently, gently.
(squall, squall, where are you?)
Gently, gently.
(let's go home)
Her nails rake a line of blood across Quistis' palm, hears Quistis' inhalation of surprise, and when Rinoa draws her palm to her lips, she tastes the magic there beneath the copper red.
She inhales.
(let's go home.)
xx
He stops.
Stands amidst the gunfire and the chaos and the waking nightmare.
Stands there, feels his heart exploding in his chest.
Lionheart is heavy at his side, and when the first bullet tears through his skin, he doesn't even feel it.
"Rinoa-"
He hears someone yelling his name, a scream to cease fire.
The second rips through his shoulder. Lionheart drops, clatters to the ground in a cacophony of steel. His fingers are dumb at the end of his palm, betrayal of the highest order. Squall stares at the sea, roiling, wild.
"Rinoa."
A third, a fourth, Seifer taking him down finally, tackling him to the grass and shielding him, and someone else casts shells, protects, anything they can.
He has broken his promise, bleeding out on the ground, feeling her power explode like a wave against the shore, a tsunami, the world-ending monster she had never wanted to become.
The cure is useless, gone, confiscated before they ever had a chance.
squall.
i'm so sorry, he thinks, his last conscious thought before the static overwhelms him, before he becomes the thing devoured.
xx
Her scream folds time and space and eternity back upon itself, again, again, again.
It is one thing to know when your knight has died, and it is another to feel it entirely, and Quistis feels it secondhand, Rinoa's fingers still locked in hers. Her keening screech amplifies everything, draws the world they're in down to the micrscopic fragment the two fo them inhabit.
The magic in Quistis' veins responds, responds, pulls away from her marrow and back to the creature who birthed it.
let me go home.
This is her living nightmare, her hand locked in Rinoa's, feeling the world implode.
xx
He shields a corpse.
He stays there until the medics come, hunched over Leonhart's body and the rain beating against his back.
He'd loved Rinoa once, after all. This is the least he can do.
He stays there, stays there, and it is only when Kadowaki puts her hands on Seifer's shoulders, does he relinquish the corpse.
The doctor forms Quistis' name with her lips, a question. He shakes his head.
He doesn't know.
She takes him back with them, trundles him into the Garden car converted into a hearse, cites shell-shock to the medics who reach for him and directs them to the corpse instead. Former commander Squall Leonhart takes precedence, even in death.
Figures.
He lasts an hour under her supervision before he makes a break for it, before he realizes that Hyperion is lost in a hotel room in Deling, that he has nothing to fight for unless a miracle occurs.
Seifer Almasy has exhausted his supply of miracles, it seems.
xx
She is torn inside out, and she cannot escape Rinoa's grasp.
let's go home.
She feels the rustling of feathers at her back, phantom limbs being sucked back into her skin and scarred over, gone, gone.
The magic is ripped from her.
rinoa please no god no it hurts-
i just want to go home.
Rinoa worms her way deeper into her, reaching with nails that tear and claws that catch. Rinoa eviscerates her, takes and takes and takes and takes.
The last kernel of magic pops in her chest, and Rinoa is unrecognizable, brown eyes gone gold, horns, horns of black, wings violent vivid white. Angel?
No.
Ten years after a war, and this is how Rinoa falls. This is how the story ends.
"Rinoa-"
The regal head inclines, the stare is fixed on Quistis and the question does not have to be said.
"Please."
There is nothing left inside of her, nothing Rinoa needs or wants or desires. Quistis tugs her hand out of the sorceress' hold. It's no longer Rinoa in there, no longer the laughing girl in a white gown, no longer the pretty rebel princess.
Their Rinoa is dead.
Please, please, please, just let me go home.
xx
His corpse is gone somewhere between the battlefield and Garden's morgue, and there is only the smell of flowers in its wake.
xx
"I'm sorry."
The words carry the weight of worlds between them.
Rinoa touches her face, and in the briefest second their eyes meet, she melts, warps, twists away and dissolves.
There is a second shadow at her side, a figure who turns, looks back at her only once.
Quistis is left grasping at air, on her knees in her own apartment.
Is this how it ends?