23. Human
AS APRIL DRAWS nearer, the rain becomes more brazen, the storms more violent. Nightly newscasts are littered with reports of washed out roads, of breached banks along the Lallapalooza River, of flooded homes in low-lying areas. If I believed in Hyne, I'd say he was angry, that he wanted to drown Deling as a consequence for our collective impudence. I don't believe in him, though, or any other god for that matter, and so while others might take this as their cue to pray, I instead chalk it up to the culmination of shitty weather mixed in with shittier luck.
It only gets worse throughout the week, and by Wednesday, the lightning returns, dominating the sky as it shreds through darkened clouds like talons through flesh. I try my best to ignore it while I work, but it's hard; the rain and thunder and hail keep begging for my attention, hammering on the siding, rattling the walls.
It's already dark by the time I finish the last of my reporting for the day. After that, I don't know what to do. See, shutting down my laptop is easy, but shutting down my brain is never quite as such, and barely five minutes later, I find myself on the couch, staring straight through the TV as my head spins out over Garden and my impending return to Balamb. I want nothing less than to make that trip. Walking down those halls again, seeing the mindless salutes for a title I'd rather shed, or hearing the whispers as staff and SeeD alike wonder why I'm there—it's enough to turn my stomach over and over, to the point where I think I might throw up.
And that's before I think about the inevitable line of questioning I'll get from Xu, or the watery, one-way conversations I'll have to entertain with the Headmaster. Or worse yet, the two of them together. I can picture the scene so clearly, the plush red carpet rolled neatly down the centre of that cold marble floor, the bright sun pouring in from the gold trim skylights like a traitor. Him sitting behind that massive desk, the Garden logo staring out like an evil eye that could turn you to stone. Her standing pin-straight next to him, his right-hand woman, ready to execute on his word.
(The last time I was sat opposite them like that, it was to tell the Headmaster I was moving to Deling. I was a fucking mess then, too, the fear of the unknown engulfing every last inch of my brain, my body still sick from tapering off Xanax.)
If I'm being honest with myself, though, there's a lot more to my apprehension than SeeD or the Headmaster or my politicking with Xu. Garden is the place where I began abusing pills, it's the place where I hurt Rinoa, it's the place where I started down the spiral. There are so many ill-fated memories that surface every time I think about it, and to be back there once more, surrounded by the walls that used to house all my indiscretions, makes my demons feel closer than they have in years.
I want to drown it out. I turn up the TV, put on basketball. It's Galbadia State versus the Trabia Lions, just over five minutes to go in the first. I'm not too terribly into sports, not like Quistis, but the back and forth, the tight score (Galbadia leading), and the constant excitement bubbling out of the commentators is enough to keep me engaged. Somewhere around halftime, my anxiety wanes enough to let me make dinner.
I'm pouring a bourbon when another peal of lightning rips through the clouds. A few seconds later, the thunder hits, crashing over like a tidal wave. And of course—just when I think I might finally start feeling something other than dread—the power goes out.
Well, so much for food, then. I grab my drink and head back to the couch to check my phone. There's still service. Only twenty-one percent battery left, though. I go to the Hydro website. It offers little clarity; cause under investigation, time to repair, unknown. Hell. I shake my head, down at least half my glass, and toss my phone onto the coffee table.
It's so quiet. Funny how you don't realize the amount of ambient noise things like the fridge and the lights create until they're turned off. Only the rain and hail remains, still tapping at the windows, still pooling on the patio, strangers begging to come in. More lightning, more thunder. I open the blinds to look outside. Everything has gone black—there are no traffic lights, no buildings dotting the skyline, no streetlights heading for the Monterosas.
I'm not sure how long I spend staring out into the darkness, but at some point, my phone breaks my trance. It's Quistis. She asks to come over, tells me she can't stand the silence. It takes only fifteen minutes between me saying yes (maybe a little too eagerly) and her arrival; she offers just one quick courtesy knock on the door before stepping inside.
"Hey," she says. I can just barely make out the shape of her Dolletian nose, her high cheekbones, in the dim light.
"Hey."
"No candle?" she asks.
I shrug, despite the fact she likely can't see it. "Want me to light one?"
"What kind of question is that?" Quistis plops down on the couch, nudges me. "Yes, please. Go get it."
"Okay, okay." I head over to the kitchen, look through the junk drawer, and pull out a half-melted lavender candle Rinoa had gotten me years ago in some feeble attempt to help with my anxiety. I light it and set it down on the coffee table. Quistis' features come into view then, the warmth of the flame settling in stark contrast to the cold, blotted out moonlight from the other side of the glass. I can see her bare face, no makeup, her heathered grey sweats, her ghost smile.
"Not a fan of the dark?" I ask as I sit down on the other section of the couch.
She shakes her head. "Nope."
I'm sure she knows exactly how it sounds. A SeeD like her, one who is so adept, who can execute her job with precision regardless of the situation, is somehow afraid of something as benign as a power outage. It'd be easy to call it crazy, but I know better. It's another case for Picasso's Girl before a Mirror, where the person Garden crafted her to be stands completely at odds with the person she really is.
She leans back into the cushion, I hand her my drink. She drains the glass with little effort. It's hard not to overthink the fact that it's been over a week since we've last hung out. So often, it seems, she's been too tired, too busy, working late, going out on dates. It's gotten to the point where I've started to worry that maybe I crossed a line at the market. It almost definitely feels that way in my head.
(Part of me wants to ask her point-blank if she's been avoiding me. I bite the inside of my lip instead.)
"Thanks for letting me come over," she says.
"'Letting you'," I parrot back with an eyeroll. "Says the girl who's all but perfected the drop-in. As if I could've said no."
She laughs. "Well, do you want me to leave then?"
I shake my head, grin. "No."
"Okay," she whispers. She looks like she's trying to reassure herself with her slow nod; something about her seems different, guarded. I can't help but wonder if it's because of the storm or because of me.
The silence between us feels stiff, unwieldy. Last time we were this uncomfortable together, it was during our first face-to-face after we'd nearly hooked up. Before that, well, it's been a long time. The one memory that surfaces is over four-years-old at this point. It was the night Rinoa left; I was (obviously) a complete wreck. When Quistis came to check on me maybe an hour afterward, I was too embarrassed to answer the door. But she let herself in anyways, and saw the full mess before her.
God, it was bad. My eyes were red and swollen, nose snotty, tears still spilling out. I was angry at first, told her to fuck off, leave me alone. I'm pretty sure I was drunk. But it didn't phase her. She turned on the TV, ordered in food that I didn't eat, gave me a box of Kleenex and some ibuprofen. And she said nothing. Neither did I after that. I felt too guilty for words, like I'd become this burden she was forced to take care of.
She looked something close to sad then—an adjacent emotion—but I was too absorbed in my own bullshit to pinpoint it at the time. Looking back now though, I know she was disappointed. Disappointed in me for succumbing to my vices, for pushing Rinoa away, for letting Harper go. And I deserved every bit of it.
I hope she's not disappointed in me now. Her gaze falls to her hands as they fidget with my empty glass. Strands of blonde hair fall in front of her face, coming loose from the mess of a bun on top of her head.
"Want anything to drink?" I ask.
"No." Her voice is quiet but firm. She puts the glass on the coffee table, grabs the pillow from the armrest, sets it in the corner of the sectional. Her head follows, coming to rest in the cushiony down, her supine form now buried underneath the scent of lavender. My thigh sinks toward her shoulder.
I'm looking straight down at her then, her half-parted lips, her pale neck, those blue-grey eyes that are still so willing to meet mine. I worry that she can read my mind. Can she see all that anxiety, all the damage? Does she know that I'm afraid? She's always been able to read me like an open book, even when I thought I had built up the walls high enough that no one could ever see. Right now, I'm paper-thin, all but translucent. Her stare feels like it's burrowing down to my collapsing centre.
I swallow. I wish there was something to fill the space. My eyes move away from hers, looking over to the crates of records, the player sitting powerless on the shelf. Help me, give me a means to escape, I beg them. Someone send me far away. Take me down to Abbey Road, I don't know what I'm doing here.
The only thing that makes a sound is her phone. She lazily draws it out of her sweatpants pocket, pulls open the screen. It's that fucking dating app. Someone's made a match. She quickly shuts it off again, puts it away.
God. I get up, almost a little too hastily, retrieve my glass from the tabletop. If my records can't save me, maybe bourbon can. I head over to the liquor cabinet, eye the selection up and down, grab a bottle.
That's as far as I get. I can't bring myself to make the pour. Running away would be so sweet, though, so easy. To just let the alcohol numb everything like it always does, to dull the roaring parade of anxious thoughts. I'm just…fuck, I'm so tired of running. It's all I ever do. Run. Hide. Push people away. Nearly thirty years of long, hard miles, despite never seeming to go anywhere.
Not once have I been brave enough to just stay still. Even now, I'm not sure I want to try, but the bottle goes back anyway, hitting the shelf with a heavy thud.
"You okay?" Quistis asks.
"Yeah," I say flatly.
She props onto her elbows and squints at me through the dark. "You don't sound okay."
Another flash of lightning brightens the space between us for barely a blink, but it's enough to highlight her unease, white light tracing across her jawline, highlighting the downturn along the corners of her mouth. Thunder almost appropriately follows, along with the rain and hail and wind thrashing against the siding—loud, frenetic static.
"Squall, come on," Quistis tries again. "Are you really going to do this now? This whole closed off thing?"
My words come out sharper than I anticipated. "Well, what does it matter to you?"
The response leaves her a bit shaken. Her brows knit together, lips draw into a hard line. "What is that supposed to mean?"
I shake my head. "Forget it. It's nothing."
"Obviously not." She sits all the way up, presses on. "Did I do something to upset you? Tell me. I want to know."
I sit down across from her on the coffee table, look into her eyes once again. I swear they have their own gravity, the way they draw me in, pulling at me until I'm little more than a thin strand. One pluck, and I'll break. I try to deflect before that can happen. "I'm sorry. It's not a big deal. Just forget about it, okay?"
"Listen, I—"
Her phone buzzes again. She sighs, takes a look, flips it face down next to mine on the table. More buzzing. She offers me an apologetic look, a small shrug from underneath that big grey sweater. A laugh escapes me then, one bit of humourless breath against the irony of it all. From the market and whispers of "don't go", to the weeks that followed where she was too busy to give the time, to now, with those pale blue wells staring at me, begging for a better answer than what I've given.
"—You what?" I ask instead.
Quistis leans closer. I can smell the hint of Coco Mademoiselle rising above the lavender. "I was just wondering if maybe I should go back home."
She starts to get up. My hand grabs hers. She stops. "Quisty, don't. I—" She's standing over me. I'm still on the coffee table. "—I'm sorry. Please. Stay."
She gives me a skeptic's smirk, sits back down. "Then tell me," she says again, "what it is that's bothering you."
I can't. Fuck, I wish I could. I wish I could say how much I hate that dating app, how it drives me mad every time it makes her phone light up, or how I'm pretty sure I feel more for her than I should. But wishes don't equate to anything, and I end up stalling out all over again. She never used to be this pressing, at least, not in recent memory. But maybe it's because she knows whatever the issue is, it's directed at her. She can smell it on me.
Her pale, wide palm pats the cushion next to her. "Sit beside me."
I do. A flash of white against the windows, a near-instantaneous boom. She gasps, jumps. And I, being the opportunist I am, see my escape route, a way to step out of her spotlight.
"Care to share why a power outage has you so wound up?" I ask.
"Only if you share what's going on with you," she retorts.
"Maybe."
She sighs, tucks fallen hair behind her ears. "Do you know why I ended up at Garden?"
I lean forward onto my elbows. "Didn't your foster family decide they couldn't manage having a kid?"
She lets out her own dead laugh. "I was ten," she starts, face softening as she recalls the story, "reading books in my room one night when a storm knocked the power out. I ran downstairs to the living room to ask my foster mom what was going on, except she wasn't there." There's a moment where she closes her eyes and pauses, draws in a low breath. I can tell she's uncomfortable, that she's nervous. But she finds her courage and continues on. "I kept calling for her, 'Mom, Mom, Mom, where are you?' Nothing. I looked in the kitchen, the family room, the bathrooms. Finally, her bedroom. She was—"
Quistis sniffles. She gives her head a shake, forces herself to reset before the tears can fall. I offer her my hand. She takes it, threads her fingers through mine. "It's okay," I tell her.
"—She was pale and clammy, lying in bed surrounded by all these crystals and gemstones. There was puke on her pillow," she says slowly, as if to tread carefully around the memory. Talking too fast might rouse it, make it turn real. "A bottle of wine and a bottle of sleeping pills. No cell phones back then, no way to call 911."
I give her hand a squeeze.
Her fingers tighten around mine, knuckles going white. "I ran outside, started banging on the neighbour's door. They took her to the hospital. They were able to pump her stomach, reverse whatever was happening. But you know, the damage was done, and my foster father, that fucking asshole. He blamed me. Told me I hadn't done my job."
"'Done your job'?" I ask.
"I was supposed to take care of her. To make sure she didn't try to kill herself." The tears fall this time, but her face betrays little else. Her voice is even, if not a bit hard. "So he sent me away. To Garden."
"Fuck," I say. It's ineloquent, but I have no other words.
"It is what it is," she says, as if the whole thing was nothing. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, lets my hand go. "I just wish I would've known. Maybe I could've stopped her."
"Quisty, I'm—"
She falls back into the cushion once more, letting herself sink as far back as it'll allow. "Don't say you're sorry. I just… I'm trying to be done with it for good, you know? It's just hard on nights like this. It's like the quiet tries to remind me of what I couldn't do."
What she couldn't do. As if any of it was ever her fault. "God, how could you have even known? You were ten-fucking-years-old." My voice is shaking. "She's lucky you found her. You got help. You saved her life. But it was never your burden to bear."
"Maybe," she concedes.
"Not maybe," I tell her. "Look at me."
She does.
"It wasn't your fault."
A few more tears spill. She wipes at those too, and gives me a small nod. "Thank you."
Fuck, I'm mad. I wish I knew who her foster father was. I'd tear into him, ask him what gave him the right to pin a suicide attempt on a child, to treat her like a liability and then throw her away. But he didn't deserve my anger. He didn't deserve anything to do with her. He didn't deserve to know what he'd missed out on, the woman she'd become—funny, articulate, brave, a goddamned prodigy.
"So," she says, "now you know."
I let a heavy exhale pass through my nose. "Yeah."
She feigns a smile. "At least you were there. You know, at Garden. I was so happy to see you again. You were my silver lining."
It was a memory the Guardians had once stolen, which now, to my surprise, is settled right back in its place. Quistis, my first friend, absent for almost six long years, and then suddenly back. I remember thinking how scared it made me; by that point, I'd had it ingrained in my head that the people who cared for me were destined to be temporary. I was afraid to get too close, too attached. Sooner or later, she'd be whisked away again, off to another family, on her way to a better life.
"I was happy to see you, too," I say. "I'm sorry I didn't know how to show it for so long."
"It's okay," she says. "We're here now. Right?"
"Yeah."
Are we here, though? Everything feels unreal. The way she's half lit by the candle, while bits of broken moonlight catch in her hair. The smell of Coco Mademoiselle coming from her and lavender from a past love. The angry thrashing of would-be gods outside, rain and hail and thunder, so loud and yet so far away. I wonder if she's that far away, too.
"Have you been avoiding me?" I don't ask so much as blurt the question out.
For a second, she looks surprised, and then, sad. There's a moment where I can tell she's gathering her thoughts, trying to cobble together what to say. "'Avoiding' isn't the right word," she tells me finally. "I just…"
"Just what?"
"I don't know. After the market, I had this urge to keep busy," she says. "I ended up stuck with all these feelings in my head about my foster mom." She turns her head down to her hands once more. "...And you know. I get that it was months ago, but after that night where we almost… I just didn't want you to think I was trying to cross a line or something."
Cross a line. God. I've been worrying about crossing lines from the moment I walked into her bedroom. I haven't stopped worrying since. Hell if it doesn't feel like I've been right on the threshold this whole time, though, and maybe even before that.
What Quistis doesn't know is that she's my silver lining, too, from the time I was just two-years-old, all the way to now. She's the bright spot shining in all my darkest places, the one always making things better. And that's what makes this so hard. I don't want to make her cry again, I don't want to make her hurt. I don't want to hurt either. I can still feel the emptiness from Zurie, the years-long ache from Rinoa.
Maybe hurt is inevitable. It's a part of life, after all, something that you'll always have to deal with. Something that makes us human. But it isn't always just a means to a painful end, right? Maybe we need to hurt in order to grow, too.
"I love you," I say.
She looks at me again with those blue-grey eyes, smirks, gives me a small nudge. "I love you, too," she says.
"No. Quisty, I think…" I shake my head as I search one last time for an escape route. There aren't any. There's only her, looking at me almost expectantly, as if she knows what I'm about to say next. And I know I need to say it, but it feels impossible to get any air from the stillness of the too-dark room. I feel like I'm drowning, searching for pockets of oxygen and coming up empty.
When the words finally do come out, they surprise me as much as they surprise her.
"I'm in love with you."
Her lips come to part once more, but she says nothing. Still, she holds on with that gravitational gaze, peering directly into me, trying to make sense of it all. Never have I wanted so badly to be able to read her, to know what she's thinking. She's just so opaque, an unconscious SeeD trained to never show her hand, her expression little more than a blank sheet.
I am freaking out. Am I a complete fucking idiot? What if I've just made a huge mistake? God, the thought of losing her comes rushing back, as unbearable as it was only months before, this crushing weight, pressing hard against my chest until I think I hear my ribs crack.
I feel bare in front of her. Here I am at twenty-nine, still at least half a mess, years spent hanging onto rope, wondering if I'm about to go tumbling down into the black once more. Will I survive another fall? I'm already broken in so many ways; there are a myriad of old wounds that never healed right. I wrap my arms around my stomach as if I've already smashed down onto the concrete floor. My insides are falling out, guts spilling away. I try desperately to hold them in place.
More buzzing. It sounds so distant. I have just enough conscious thought left to tell it's a call. The phone thrums against the coffee table, five rings before it stops. I try to ignore it, but immediately, it starts up again. I wonder if she'll pick it up. She doesn't move. She just continues to stare at me.
Five more rings, a pause, and then again. Fuck. Fuck! I tear my eyes away from Quistis and immediately realize the offending phone is mine. And it's Rinoa. Rinoa? I answer.
"Hey," I say.
"Squall! Why didn't you pick up?" Her voice is shaking. There's loud crying in the background, the sound of road noise. "I need you. It's Harper."
That gets my attention. "What's wrong?"
"She fell and she…" she says. "...oh god." There's a shrill yell of "mommy" from the backseat. I can tell Rinoa's only moments from tears, herself. "It's okay baby, do your best not to worry, alright? It's going to be okay."
I try not to go into a full-blown panic, but my anxiety was already pinned from my fresh confession to Quistis, and now this—hearing Harper's cries, her screams, and listening to Rinoa as she barely holds herself together—has me in a tailspin. Quistis' own expression has become far less opaque; there's fear there now, fear she's drawn from the worry I have written all over my face.
Her hand finds mine once more. I hold it tight.
"Rinoa, what's going on?"
"I'm taking Harper to the hospital. Meet me at Deling General," she says, "and please hurry."