epilogue.
He holds her for hours, when he stumbles upon her looking for a weapon before he remembers that all of their things are scattered, that there's a walk-up apartment in Balamb that he has a key to, that half their stuff is still in a hotel room in Deling.
Wars tear a person in six different directions, and Seifer is running out of pieces to leave behind. He keys in a lock code. She is already on the other side, hand against the panel that opens the door, and they stand there, staring at each other.
She is Quistis Trepe, in loose denim and a t-shirt stained with blood, hair lank and filthy around her shoulders, and that is all she is. He hauls her into his arms with a shout, kisses her until she begs to be set back down on her own two feet.
He can't stop touching her, though, a hand in hers or at her shoulder or carding through her tangled hair. She keeps leaving him, she keeps vanishing, when he needs her most, and now that she is back, Seifer thinks that if he doesn't let go, she won't disappear again.
He can't lose her again. He can't take it, nose buried in her bright golden hair, inhaling the scent of her, and it is only later, later, when she finally extricates herself for a shower, coming out dressed in one of his old t-shirts that was still in the back of their closet and a pair of pastel-peach gym shorts, that he realizes she smells like herself.
She finds a spare pair of her glasses tucked in the back of the nightstand drawer, unfolds them and sets them on her face.
He reaches out for her. She sets her hand in his, and lets herself be drawn to bed.
There is no magic in her, nothing that warps who she is.
They have come back to the beginning, a man and a woman and a too-narrow bed in Garden-run quarters.
xx
It is Xu who was her first friend at Garden, and it is Xu who makes the decision to throw her out on her ass.
Quistis doesn't blame her, after all. What use does Garden's new regime have for a blue mage with no magic left in her? It isn't a court martial. It isn't exile, like Rinoa received once, it isn't a trial.
It isn't a burning at the stake, or a firing squad.
She is given a severance package, battlefield-pay, even if she had no part in the actual fighting. Xu grills her about what happened to Rinoa, where Squall's corpse has gone. Quistis has no answers, none that satisfy.
"I don't know," only stretches so far, after all.
Somewhere happy, she hopes, because that was what saved them all the first time, wasn't it? Friendship, happiness? She takes her dismissal paperwork, signs her name on the required dotted lines.
I quit, Seifer had said, and at least it is a decision Quistis doesn't have to make for herself. She will always be a SeeD; it is what saves her, time and time again. Garden will always have her loyalty, but she has enough to spare.
Seifer will always have it, too.
They move to a little house in Dollet, right along the shore. She spends her mornings on the deck with a cup of coffee, the newspaper, and ignores most of what passes as news in favor of watching Seifer, Hyperion in his hand as he goes through fluid motions, practicing, practicing for what he is afraid will be coming next.
There is a gold ring on her finger, and a certificate from the Dollet courthouse eight months later.
They are happy, even as she wakes up one night with the strangest feeling in her chest, like galaxies are dancing there.
He mumbles her name. She tells him that she's alright, to go back to sleep. He obliges, turning his head away and burying it back into the pillow.
They are SeeD, and they are not, and when she focuses on that feeling, trying to draw it up, up, out, her hand open in the darkness of their bedroom, Quistis doesn't know what she's hoping for.
Maybe something. Maybe nothing.
xx
You're going to like me, you're going to like me.
They sit at the edge of a lotus pond, and she wags her finger in his face, hypnotic.
(His body aches in all places, and he is knit back together with what feels like molten sun. Squall Leonhart has been to the other side of death more than once, but this time... he isn't sure if all of him has come back.)
I love you, he tells her, and her smile is shark-white teeth. She shimmers faintly around the edges now, as if she'll disappear in one good, strong breeze. But she is so much more than nothing, she is incomprehensible in her power.
She weeps sometimes, when she thinks he can't tell, hands folded over her abdomen and I'm sorry like a brand along her tongue.
Squall knows that she never wanted this, but the succession must always continue, and at least they are together. The power can never be split, can never be divided. She is Rinoa, and she is something Other.
The house is a sprawling estate on the far edge of Esthar, as far as Squall can tell- what cities look like that as seen from a distance, all blue surrealism reaching for the sky? He doesn't call his father, doesn't seek out anyone. No one has to know they're here at all. It's like she's cast a spell over the whole place.
This is paradise, this ancient house. As far as he can tell, it used to be a monastery, before Ultimecia rose to power and laid waste to the land. He's got a lot of time to read, as of late, all the crumbling battered books in the library.
"It's cursed," Rinoa tells him once, floating across the courtyard. "No one comes out here, because they're afraid of the monsters."
He encounters a slight, bald man with a buddha's grin every now and again, a smile and a laugh and gone from sight. He leaves the smell of just-struck incense in his wake. Squall knows who he is without having to ask.
On one of his very brief forays into the edges of town, he buys a packet of incense at a shop and a cheap plastic lighter. The offering is rewarded. There is food heaped in the old kitchens, fresh and delicious and real between his teeth.
A monster, a dead man, and a god.
There is a joke there, if anyone cares to find it.