Timing

Things are normal, and there is nothing to be concerned about.

At morning, when the sun glittered on the gentle swells of the low tide and the grasses were touched with a frost, the horizon as far as Edea could see was sparkling like magic, encased in a sense of otherworldly serenity that lay on her shoulders like a warm quilt.

Wise to the power that had begun pulling on her, so many restless nights ago, which caused her to leave her marriage bed and travel so far away, to a place that only she remembered, she had made the choice to end her life.

Edea Kramer ends her life on a lovely, cold morning, and is laid down by herself.

—

Ten years later

—

Discovering that this thing could fucking fly was the best thing they had done in years. Nothing like unpredictably and aggressively wielded material power to keep rats like Deling on his toes.

And, sure, Squall was going to be deployed to Deling’s service very soon, but he could enjoy watching the bright, glimmering Garden skimming like a water spider over the waves and fantasize about climbing up the rock wall with screaming thrusters to settle down right next to the bastard’s self-titled city like it wasn’t a big deal.

In reality, they were planning to dig into the dirt quite a bit further out; probably out into the Gotland, where few people lived. He hoped it would rustle the old bastard anyway.

He must have been staring out into the waves for quite some time, because the doors opened up with a chime of pressurized air to let in Quistis’s dully clicking heels. The ravages of time had forced her to start wearing flat soles like a sane woman when on mission, but the second she walked back into Garden, she went to her room and strapped them on. Habits were habits.

“Too long?” he asked as she settled comfortably on the rail next to him.

“Long enough for me to catch up with you,” she countered, stretching her hands over the railing to give a bit of comfort to her stressed shoulders. (First time they brought her to an actual, off-Garden doctor, which wasn’t the goal of the mission and happened quite incidentally, he told her that her back was ‘one big mass of knots, in fact, just knots.’ Since then, they started hiring niche medical practitioners to reside in the Garden to work with the Doctor because, come on, are the most prized special forces on the planet going to be laid low by back pain?) “It’s like a mob in there. I stopped trying to organize it.”

“That bad?”

“All I know is Kinneas put his hands on the wrong assassin, and things have devolved from there. And I try not to get involved in Kinneas business even when I’m sworn it’s fine.”

Squall closed his eyes in exasperation. Irvine had been, many years ago, one of the only escapees from Galbadia Garden before it got split into a pretty brutal faction schism in miniature, which ended with a much weakened Garden and some pretty bad blood. Inevitable when the Headmaster’s dirty dealings were exposed. And it was, in the end, to Balamb’s advantage as she slowly established herself as the only real Garden power.

The point is that Irvine was just kind of theirs now, like a weird foster kid who can’t be reasoned with in regards to his behavior, but can be counted on to no-scope people when they needed it.

“Heading out once we anchor?” she asked him.

“Before,” Squall groaned, thinking of the frustratingly slow process docking the Garden had become after the ONE TIME it had slipped into gear when Nida was off-Garden and perhaps drifted over a town and sheared off their roofs a little.

“What, you’re going to hop off of the balcony mid-flight?” She asked, clearly concerned he would.

"No. I’m just not waiting for the triple re-checks.”

“Ah.” She flipped her hair out of her face, then swore as the wind blew it right back. “Son of—do you have a hair tie or something?”

“Why would I have one?”

“You always have my things.”

“What? Hey,” he said, as Quistis reached a hand around his side and then slipped her fingers into one of the pockets on his pants.

“Pocket knife,” she said, and then leaned over farther to dig into a different pocket. “Ammo, candy? Tea bag, receipt…”

"What’s wrong with you,” Squall stated, entirely without the expectation of a response. Quistis started ruffling through his jacket pockets instead.

“Nope—nothing—a napkin? Oh, here are my things,” she said, reaching all the way around him to a zipped pocket she popped open.

“Your things??”

“Tampon, a pen, emergency batteries, hair clips, hair binders!” she said triumphantly, pulling all of those things in succession out of the jacket that he was wearing.

“What the hell,” Squall said, significantly perplexed, as Quistis flipped her head to pull back her hair. And he did get lost for a second, as her eyes closed in focus, corralling a thousand disobedient strands, and he could watch her flicker between different soft kinds of frustration without her looking at him. “Quistis. Squall is not your pack mule.”

“He isn’t?” she asked, feigning surprise. Still her eyes were closed as she started to loop the tie around the hair she had barely gathered in a steady fist.

“No. He’s your boss.”

“That so?” said Quistis, the most hierarchy-minded woman he had never known. Except when it came to himself, apparently. “But if he follows behind me, does what I say, and carries my things, what else is he?”

“…”

“Oh, come on.”

“Come on what.”

“Joke with me.”

“Nope.”

“I can see it.”

“See what?”

“The comeback. It’s right on the tip of your tongue.”

“…”

“Come on. Say it to my face.”

He cracked a tiny grin and he hated it. The incongruity of the fact that Quistis had a kill count rivalling the best of them and that she couldn’t sound intimidating to save her fucking life as too cute, like it always was. “…What else would you call a boyfriend,” he finally said.

“Ha!” She briefly laughed, soundlessly, one hand on her cheek. “Well, that was okay. Not very biting, but it had the form of a joke in it.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

She might have kept ragging on him, once upon a time, but the criticisms had been said, and an understanding had been reached quite some time ago. Now what she used to criticize she remarked on fondly; he rarely found it in himself to mention her flaws at all, though she certainly still had them. She was something different to him, now, something well-known under the wire-rim glasses, padded shoulders and wire-cups, the strapped-on heels and layers of under armor. Familiar bones, and familiar space.

Instead she laid a head on his shoulder for a few seconds, just a few, and then straightened up to twist her neck around, with some unpleasant popping.

“You’ll be on loan for quite a bit, unfortunately,” she said.

“I know.”

“Best way to avoid giving too many SeeDs to Deling was to give him a good one. Luckily, we want the information he’s after too, so he’ll have to deal with you checking in to Garden regularly.”

“What a hassle,” said Squall, deadpan. “Really gonna make me walk like that?”

“Sure not letting you drive,” she said, completely fairly. He couldn’t even dispute that point. The only thing Squall could reliably drive was driving the mechanics crazy.

“Are you going to be on ground?”

“…Not yet,” she said, in an uncertain tone of voice. “Xu said she’s reserving me for when we have a better understanding of what the situation is, so, that’s up to what you find out, honestly.”

A little laissez-faire for Xu, he thought. He said so.

Quistis agreed with a quiet hum. After thought, she said, “Xu’s taking anything Sorceress-related with extra care. Actually, I’m willing to say she’s being overcautious. It seems to have… an extra quality, to her.”

“Extra quality.”

“As if… the ‘sorceress’ isn’t just a more difficult target for her… but a stranger, less definable one.”

“Hm.” Not that Squall could or really wanted to wrap his mind around this ‘sorceress’ business either. But it was likely about to be his job to do so. “Who’s been digging up intel already?”

“Librarians, squad C, Selphie has her ear to the ground, the usual,” Quistis shrugged. “You already know where to look.”

“…I’ll stop by the library,” he muttered, seeing as that was his favorite out of any of those options. Squad C brought in too much hearsay with them and were loud; Selphie came with strings attached and was nosy. The librarians generally seemed frustrated to have to be speaking to him (or anyone) but they were accurate and they liked being asked interesting questions. The downside was that their information might not be as fresh, since they went through the hassle (unlike the rest of his options) of VERIFYING it.

“You’ll want to get moving, then,” said Quistis, looking at her watch, realizing her watch didn’t tell her anything useful, and scanning the gently rolling horizon of golden grass and shifting wings to judge their proximity to Deling. “If you don’t want to get stuck in the tie-down.”

“You busy with something else?” he asked, curious.

“I’m still ON duty,” Quistis reminded him.

“Oh,” he said, having entirely forgotten the representative from Esthar. “What are you doing with me if you’re on escort?” he asked, a little annoyed and confused that she would neglect an important mission.

“Doctor Kadowaki told me to come back in fifteen when he stops puking,” she him, amused but dry, like a chardonnay. “This flight business is just too much for some.”

Squall raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. That would do it. “You going to pretend nothing happened when you attach to his side again, or ask him nicely if he’s feeling better now?”

“Ooohh, I know I should do the former, but don’t tempt me to the latter,” she sighed. “Alright, get moving, Squall.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not like that,” she said, tapping his shoulder as he turned around. He leaned down for the kiss; brief, but firm, like she always was. “Better.”

“Thanks, boss.”

“Oh, leave,” she huffed whacking him toward the door. “You can’t say a sweet goodbye for once?”

She said it with no venom whatsoever. Turned away from her, Squall felt his attachment to her as a bit of hot softness inside, like a bright sun-orange cloud. “No,” he said, matter-of-fact.

She was laughing at him when he walked back through the hissing double doors, tired and fond.

—

Lieutenant-or-something Leonhart had made deeper inroads than anyone involved wanted with the staff of the library. His title wasn’t official, and he had made it himself. As such, the good women of the library didn’t like that they didn’t have a call number for him.

What had once been a modest collection of diverting paperbacks and out-of-date textbooks had, at some point after Xu’s ascendancy, become the de facto depository for the piles of paperwork the Garden generated. Apparently Xu STILL hadn’t found some of the places Cid used to stash this shit, and that bothered her, so now, a few of the people who had been student-librarians had transitioned to just Librarians and ruled the maintenance and organization of the swamp of mission reports, travel journals, research papers, exposes, leaks, and other documents belonging to the Garden and describing the politics, land, peoples, and secrets of the world around them.

It was a far sight more useful than it had once been, and a far sight more annoying. When ‘Librarian’ became a person’s only title, it seemed, they gained disdain for all mankind and the ability to read a dossier of your crimes by looking at you.  

Here were the bare bones of the official and semi-official, mostly illegally obtained papers he rifled through in the spare hour before he deployed: ‘Rinoa Heartilly,’ 27, had made a public declaration ~3 months ago of her status as a sorceress. Previously the daughter of General Carraway of Deling City (disowned), never married, personal history suspiciously difficult to track. This combined with her affiliation to local insurrectionary political movements has caused civic unrest and rampant militarization in and around Deling City rivalled only by the throat-punch that had been Esthar literally appearing back on the map ~2 weeks ago.

Trying to integrate Esthar back into the current day political landscape had… sucked so far, Squall reflected, as he flipped some off-white papers with bent edges around in front of him under the disapproving glare of the head librarian. There had been a LOT of sleepless nights after a lost world power just… showed up again, with way more than its fair share of technological progression for its not-quite-thirty years absence. They had prepared statements, they had ambassadors, they had treaties, and they caught the rest of the squabbling and fractioning world, who had nonesuch, kind of with their pants down.

Which was exactly the wrong time for one (or two??) freshly emergent ‘sorceresses,’ but word on the lips of the librarian who was talking to him right now was that these separate incidents were likely related.

"So… there are two sorceresses?” He asked, mostly following.

“Maybe,” she said. “We don’t have confirmation of that yet; frankly, we don’t even have solid confirmation that Heartilly is one. What I mean is that the expressed fact of sorceress action, whether or not it is a confirmed fact, appears to have been the cause of just about all of the rest of these political incidents when you dig down far enough. They didn’t write it into their official introductions, but transcripts of interviews and tables with Estharian diplomats reveal a distinct preoccupation with the sorceress question.”

“Why,” said Squall, like an idiot.

He then received a free and invasive lecture about Esthar’s history as a political unit (in stereo) until he finally found an opening to get out of the library while no one was looking.

Books and documents and information specialists were all well and good; he preferred to wait for people to speak for themselves. Even if they didn’t want to, prolonged silence usually did them in.

                

—

One of the mechanics drove him in to Deling; she wanted to test a motor she had tweaked. It was loud, but it accelerated in a way he found unholy, which seemed to be the intended outcome. The golden grasses whipped by them, a herd of monsters would raise their glittering gazes to the gleaming vehicle and track them, but wouldn’t move to catch them. The sun sunk as they reached the sparkling city.

The shop at Deling seemed reluctant to refuel the car, considering the un-carlike noises and weird shaking it did. Squall left them to their arguing about ‘what that thing even fucking is’ and absently stretched his side as he walked into the city.

Deling did, and didn’t, change much. Unlike a sleepy seaside port, new buildings would go up and old ones would go down; they would redecorate the entire central square for holidays or brand promotions. There were army recruiters on street corners now, done up in riot armor and stopping young men who passed by. But Deling itself had a smoky and gasoline-tinged air that didn’t really change, a sort of heart of smudgy oil slick that left its unmistakable mark on the grimy exteriors of splashy and gold-trimmed hotels, the expensive high bootheels of condescending maids and matrons, and the rubber tracks burned into the well-paved and tired streets, trod down by heavy military parades and the grinding tanks of their beloved dictator.

He wondered what the hell they were going to do when Deling croaked, because the man was not in fine shape, and he wasn’t young either.

People who recognized him—mostly cardsharks or generals he’d worked with before—reached out to clasp his hand as he passed. The air was nervous, grim, and anticipatory; dictatorships thrive on secrecy, but the average person had still heard on the street that it might be war.

Maybe they shouldn’t have sent one of their most visibly recognizable SeeDs to stalk up to the palace? But he didn’t run the ship.

And he was stalking maybe a little more than he should have. The finest of SeeDs would have stopped at a few store fronts, dallied, drummed up conversation on the street with old contacts when he ran across them. It would settle the mood somewhat, and get him good information to boot. But Squall had so fucking little respect for Vinzer Deling that he could hide his spite for maybe, MAYBE half an hour, and he needed to get the meeting done with as soon as possible before he had (more of) a chance to work up a bad mood.

When you go on the ground, you’re gonna love it, he insisted to himself. It’s been so long since you’ve gotten to do a real, in-the-mud campaign. Just get through a debriefing with Vinzer and don’t fucking say anything to him. Do it for Quistis, Squall.

Shiva echoed the sentiment, a little quieter, with a reassuring chill. Keep your treatment of the old despot, still, sure, and icy, she assured him, and he will slide right over you.

I’m not sure I like the mental image of being swept over, he complained.

Like an ice skater glides over the depths, she explained again. Touching the very surface only. What is inside, which we have frozen deep in the darkness, forever untouched. By an empty tyrant, or by any other man.

Never again, he echoed dully, as if pulled into a rhyme with her.

No different from how we always handle violent, blustering, hollow men. They slip right past. We are undisturbed.

His shoulders shook as if he had been sliding, belly-up, against the heavy, black ice himself, being drawn by her great hand. He woke back up to his feet stomping down the wet and oily pavement, interestingly, right as he was passing by the house of General Caraway, whose daughter was lighting the continent up.

The man was still a general. Deling didn’t just disbar people. Typically, he put them on a silent house arrest. Wherever this General Caraway went now, he would be watched, carefully, by innumerable spies—and the public, just as desperate for extra cash or social clout in the tight-fisted dictatorship. He would not be sent to battle, he would not be allowed out of the city (being told he was on standby eternally, no doubt), he would be expected to show his face at dinners and parades and exhibitions and parties—and Deling would wait patiently until he cracked, publicly, and did something worth being brought in for.

The sad thing was, from what he read, the sorceress dipped out of her father’s house years ago. He probably didn’t even have any worthwhile intel for the regime. But the regime thrived on public punishment, its self-fulfilling cycle of population control.

This was really the only stop Squall was tempted to make before getting to the palace. He was tempted to get a look at and a statement from the arrested General himself. Again, not for intel. He was shit at official intel. But for an idea of the girl who had become a sorceress from the man who had made and raised her.

What does a father think of a child who has grown up a monster? He often wondered.

But he could only figure the meeting would make him even more irate when he actually got to Deling, so, he had to pass. Cool. Calm. Collected. He picked his pacing back up to get to the presidential palace.

—

“There he goes,” sighed Selphie Tilmitt, a hand over her heart, a cheeky grin climbing up one cheek. “Your knight in leather armor.”

Quistis raised an eyebrow at her. “If you’re jealous, Selphie, I’m sure Irvine can comply to any costume requests.”

Really, Quistis was at ease with few SeeDs more than Master Spy Tilmitt. Originally from Trabia, she came to Balamb to take her SeeD test and, after a series of situations in which she was borrowed for surprise emergency missions, never left. Like GF Master Leonhart, she had been able to dig in her own niche as the resident Master Spy—it helped that she mysteriously looked as cute, pert, tiny, and unsuspicious as she had at sixteen. And somehow, the wily, unassuming expert sneak had snuck her way into Squall’s good graces as well, but Quistis would go on record saying that the two of them resemble nothing more than a pair of mutually squabbling siblings. However she did it, and for whatever reason, Squall had gotten used to Selphie; they appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, ‘friends.’

With all that being said it should be of no concern that Selphie giggled and suggestively stuck her tongue out at Quistis. “Maybe I wi~ill! I just said good-bye to him though,” she sighed, turning morose and leaning over the bannister looking out over the fields.

“They’re sending you on the ground too?” asked Quistis, a little surprised. Though, of course, not surprised that she was surprised; exactly two people knew the spy’s orders at any given time, herself and whoever had given them.

“Mmm-hm,” Selphie agreed, her face lighting up again as she watched the car carrying Squall rev past a hill. “I’m going to have to catch up with him somehow!”

“So he is under investigation,” Quistis sighed. Shit.

“Uh, no!” Selphie disagreed, with a bit of a tik in her brow as she turned to look at Quistis. “If I was checking up on him, I wouldn’t be telling YOU! Though why didn’t it surprise you?”

Quistis wouldn’t be able to summarize the worries, fears, and suspicions that suddenly bubbled up in her heart like a rolling boil quickly. “—I’d rather not—”

“Sure,” said Selphie, letting it go as easily as a cat who wanted to bat at a toy again. Quistis just looking concerned was all the bait she needed, of course. “But no, Xu couldn’t have a better opinion of Squall. I’m not checking up on HIM, I’m checking up behind him. He’s an amazing Merc, but he’s a little below average at gathering intel. Which is usually fine, but, unfortunately, Vinzer is WAY above average at HOARDING intel. Deling’s almost certainly going to put him in action first thing; upstairs wants someone to be flirting around toown for a little more info too, that’s all.”

It checked out, honestly. Squall had—actually, a mediocre mission success record, considering his prestigious rank at the Garden. His strengths were phenomenal, his weak points were incredibly soft and stabable. Let him command army movements, recover stolen equipment, or straight up assassinate a political figure on live TV, and you can sit back and watch. Sending him on a stealth mission usually worked out, but please, please don’t expect him to gather any more intel than the average rank 5 SeeD. And whatever you do, do NOT expect diplomacy. He didn’t get people, not really—but that’s why he managed Guardian Forces, whose language of control, magic, and mystery he seemed to speak fluently.

“It goes without saying, but be careful,” Quistis said, in a form of wishing her well. “Things are weird down there.”

“Things are A-Rank weird down there,” Selphie agreed cheerfully. “The situation has shifted so much, so quickly, it’s like the Centra Wilds in Galbadia! I’m so excited,” she sighed.

Quistis couldn’t help chuckling at her. “Well, keep in contact, we don’t want to wait for a huge info dump at once when the situation—”

“Yes, Mrs. Xu, sweet STARS,” Selphie sighed, flipping her hair behind her with a bit of pique and a glimmer of dusty magic. Quistis swore she could see it for a second, her elusive, particular guardian, its octopus-like cloak of stripes and stars and patches, the shifting visage, as if just behind—maybe just inside—of the spy. Then Selphie changed with startling speed; her hair grew full and dark behind her back, she grew three inches, lost her thin and wiry muscle, became slim, tanned, blue-eyed. She picked at her now ill-fitting dress with distaste. “It’s not my first mission, ‘Tiss,” she said with another woman’s voice.

“Who’s this?” asked Quistis.

“Huh?”

“Where’d Gogo pick this body up?” asked Quistis, referring to Selphie’s strange, eccentric Guardian Force. “I don’t recognize her.”

“Good!” said Selphie, in an understated, lazy tone of voice, presumably native to the stranger. “I hate it when I walk down the street in disguise and someone recognizes me. I saw her on Fisherman’s Horizon. Her name is Perch! I didn’t even have to follow her around for Gogo to map her movements, she walked right up to me, made conversation, invited me to get a drink.”

“Were you a man at the time?”

"Nope. I was me,” she said, and now Quistis could pick out that slow drawl Fishermen girls had, though Selphie had understated it a little. “I don’t even think she was picking me up, I think she was friendly and bored. Anyway, easy catch!” she said, a little glimmer of herself shining through with a sparkle in her eyes.

"Well, here’s hoping Perch will be popular in the streets of the big city,” Quistis said with an amused tilt of her head.

“Country girl, never seen the big city before, wants to know how things work ‘round here? Oh, please,” Selphie scoffed. “I’m about to net Perch the biggest catch of her life. If she likes a piping hot dinner of classified intel, that is.”

"Well, don’t accidentally make her a big deal in a local casino or something,” Quistis warned her. “We don’t want another Nida incident.”

“He still hasn’t forgiven me,” said Selphie with a little bit of quiet awe. “How long has it been, Nida?”

“He still can’t walk into Dollet without a fight, Selphie.”

“Like Dollet is the only fucking city on the Continent! God! You can go somewhere else!”

Quistis couldn’t help but laugh. Jokes aside, Selphie had gotten much, much better at managing her one-of-a-kind shape-shifting guardian since then, despite Squall’s constant threats to take them back. The junction by now that the eerie staying power that, for instance, Squall himself and Shiva had, in which a real and strange relationship had coalesced in the murky depths between species.

Quistis liked her own Guardians to stay at arm’s length. Honestly, the closeness some had to their guardians frightened her, somewhere deep inside, as if in a box she misplaced and didn’t know how to find. Nor did she want to.

“But I gotta go, if I don’t want Squall to completely lose me in the dust,” Selphie sighed, kicked herself off of the railing.

“You’d better,” Quistis agreed, seeing as the car had long since left her sight. “Though I doubt he’d go anywhere but straight to Deling.”

“Sure, but he’ll keep the talk short because, like anyone with a brain, he hates Deling,” Selphie prattled, taking a second to tie Perch’s long, thick hair into a tail. “And then he’ll go right to wherever he’s been stationed, because why would he detour, so, yup, better keep on my toes.”

"Good luck,” said Quistis.

“Got it!” said Selphie, with a self-confident smile, as the doors hissed shut behind her.

—

Sweet fucking Hyne, let’s not even TALK about what Deling’s stupid, self-focused, blustering ass actually SAID to Squall. You don’t fucking want to hear it from him.

He snapped out of the presidential palace occupying his mind by mentally writing up his report of the encounter instead. If he boiled it down to the two bites of actual information, and repeated those ad nauseum, maybe he could get the rest of it out of his head.

War has already been declared and confirmed. This is not public knowledge. We’re two days late to the fighting. There has been one significant battle, total casualties probably only a few hundred, at the plains outside of a desert prison that the rebels have taken and occupied. A small skirmish also happened this morning, intended to gather info about the rebel’s defenses outside the prison. Squall was to immediately report to the President’s stationed forces at the coastal mission base for their instruction.

Now. While he was able to put it in bias-free terms, the fact that FIGHTING HAD ALREADY BEGUN was a fucking next-level jaw-popping smack to the face. Because Garden hadn’t fucking known that. Garden not knowing a WAR had started would be like Garden not knowing where they had just misplaced their own asses. Garden’s fucking worldwide and incredibly tight networked of bribed, bartered, and threatened informants had been cultivated literally just to keep on top of information as miniscule as who was considering trade deals with who and definitely as maximal as FUCKING DECLARATIONS OF WAR. And Garden being LATE to combat was like Garden being late to a schedule execution. It was a fucking unimaginable breach in their entire fucking purpose.

Holy shit. Okay. He wasn’t sure whether to chalk this crock of shit up to Deling’s incredible fascist grip on information, the fact that the rebels strictly refused to speak to Gardens at all, or maybe, fucking, the worst luck in the world. A much smarter person than him would work out how this all went wrong; he was going to go report to a fascist informant to see who he was supposed to kill.

He took a way back through the city that didn’t involve stopping by the General’s house at all; he didn’t want to be tempted. He aggressively stopped by a side-stall to get some equipment he didn’t need because he knew he needed to cool off. He could hear Quistis’s voice, or maybe Shiva sounding like Quistis, in his head; you can’t lose your composure like that again. If everyone knew…

Even so, the streets and lamplights and socialites of Deling blurred in his head until he found himself in the garage and only slightly cooled off. It looked like the mechanic had in fact gassed up and tweaked her motor herself, while the local mechanics stood by in distrustful awe of her mad science machine. Fair enough, he reflected, and said nothing at all as he popped open the passenger door and shut himself in.

“—So we’re going?” she asked him, with a hint of recrimination. He nodded, and she shrugged and got in to the driver’s side.

“Pull out, drive south,” said Squall, after she rolled up the windows.

“Sure,” she said, used to and tired of the tight-lipped world of the mercs who employed her.

Once they were a mile out of Deling, swerved immediately off of the road and onto the shaky ground (as was the habit of most Garden drivers) Squall disclosed their actual coordinates. The driver raised an eyebrow. “That’s one of the missile bases, I think?” she said.

“Correct,” he confirmed. “I have to report.”

“Comm’s left of the glovebox,” she said, with raised eyebrows.

She had hooked up her radio to an awkward location right below the dash, but, when he pulled it out of the receiver, he realized it was kind of convenient to hold to your ear and nestle against the door with a hunched glower with. So that wasn’t so bad.

Squall punched in the code to go right up to Xu’s desk on the private line after forgetting to ask if that would work. Luckily, it did, even though he had already resolved to just hang up if it was the wrong person.

“This is Xu,” she said, disregarding the grandness she could have introduced herself with.

“Leonhart,” Squall said in response.

"Reporting already?” she asked.

“On my way to another location,” Squall clarified, “but I have time-sensitive info.”

“Report,” she said.

Squall steeled his shoulders and recited exactly what he had practiced in his head. It took one sentence (War has already been declared and confirmed) before the mechanic’s palms stiffened into a death grip on the blackened-steel steering wheel. Xu was as silent as a dead line until Squall said “end report.”

Xu was still silent.

“…Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said at length. Someone who didn’t know her might describe her tone as flat. Squall knew it was a very, very thin veneer of calm. “Are you on your way to the coastal missile base now?”

“T minus…” Then he looked at how fast they were clipping past the hills are reconsidered. “Four hours, maybe.”

“Sure,” said the mechanic, and stepped on it harder.

“Fantastic,” Xu said. “Good. Go there.”

Squall waited on the line for a minute for Xu to collect herself.

“…I’ll reclaim your car after you’re dropped off there,” Xu decided, fairly enough. “Do you have a feel on how long you’ll be positioned?”

“Not yet,” Squall admitted. “I’m on mission ‘until’ and I don’t want to say how long that is until I see how hard it’ll be to mop up the rebels.”

“Long-term, anyway, which is what we expected,” Xu said. “Don’t worry about setting up a line of contact or anything, get to work and we’ll handle the rest. If this rebel faction has a base they’ve taken over, it may well take some time to settle this. If the terms of our contract with Vinzer change, we’ll get in touch with you.”

“Got it,” said Squall, who was hearing exactly what he expected. Xu wanted him to put his nose to the grindstone and churn out as many results as Deling could possibly want. That way, Garden was without reproach if Xu found a way to take up issue with his contract.

"I have other people looking into intel, so don’t worry about that.”

Squall didn’t respond. He hoped that she had assumed he wasn’t on top of that. “Any further instruction?”

“No. I trust your judgement as to your attack plan. If the situation changes, we’ll inform you at first opportunity. Dismissed.”

Squall did automatically salute her, but, thankfully, the mechanic didn’t roll her eyes at him. He waited for Xu to hang up first, then set down the phone.

With a satisfying click into the receiver, Squall found himself weirdly crunched forward in a car seat, hand drifted out into the air, eyes kind of glazing over. He kind of wanted to curl into a little ball for a minute, but he was an almost-thirty-year-old, internationally acclaimed mercenary, and he was not alone right now. So he settled on a slightly more acceptable version of curling into a little ball, that is, leaning back in his chair, putting a hand on his face, and pretending he wasn’t there.

Time sort of slipped by him as he watched the golden plains go brown and thin, then patchy, then fade away to little shrubs and stone. The salt of the sea increased in the air just as it as killing the ground. But he began to hear it, as they grew closer, and closer. The low and persistent buzz of working machinery, clomping boots, lines and squares. The sound of men at war. Like a slow drumbeat, or the rushing of the tide, it put his mind at ease.

The Galbadian army was his favorite. Not for any good reason. They tended to be intolerable individually. But the regimented men, accustomed to surveillance and control from birth, were a soothing mass of predictability that he felt free inside of. No guesswork. Identical helmet after identical helmet. The same fear, focused preoccupation with staying in line, and compressed, sublimated frustration in every single one of them. Identical. They were identically nervous and resentful of him, in a way he could handle in his sleep.

Deling’s people weren’t all like this, even though they were all subject to similar surveillance pressures across his nation. But his army was crushed into a predictable, dull, cruel sameness Squall could count upon.

The mechanic dropped him off about an hour’s walk outside of the actual base, which was common practice with Balamb’s drivers. There was a mid-level incident a few years back where someone managed to get the schematics on a Garden vehicle that was left unattended for two minutes. So, now, no one was even allowed to look at them.

Their mechanics hadn’t been told to do that, either. They decided.

“Close enough,” she said, an eased the car into a stop. “I don’t envy you this job, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t envy you the debriefing you’re going to get for even hearing what I said about it.”

"Yeah, thanks, by the way,” she grinned. “I’m about to go through about eight hours of ‘how to not snitch’ remedial work, jerk.”

"Here to serve,” he said, and started walking a mile through the wasteland to a glistening missile silo.

—

Original Note:

—

Brother, try and hope to find/You were always so far away

You remember, back in the day, how we used to write slash fics that were half awkward gay romance, and half uncomfortably emotionally raw hatred of the female characters from the original story? Yes, this is not that. This fic kind of started happening out of my frustration with that. Slash and het ships will be going on simultaneously, they won't necessarily be cancelling each other out.

I've been a little weirdly OTP about Seifer/Squall for... a long time. I never ending up writing something I really liked, but (Bad) Timing is now about 35k words in and going somewhere. I do want to emphasize that it is currently WIP and I may have to take some breaks!

Since this is AU that diverges from canon, let me know if anything isn't clear about plot/setting and I'll clarify unless I'm deliberately holding something in the wings. The most important facts are these: Matron Edea made the choice to commit suicide, something (?? spoiler ??) happened to all of her magic, and the Timber rebellion carried on as a sorceress-less, bombs-and-bodies kind of war. Some of FFVIII's protagonists dug in their heels and learned how to stop worrying and love the Garden during wartime (especially Squall, who needs an anchor in his life, poor thing) while some others split and went on different paths. Esthar did not reemerge until much alter, as no sorceress drama was pushing them to do so. GF amnesia is canon but so deeply entrenched that most regular users don't notice it. The basic facts of where we are now should become clear in the first few chapters : )

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There are some unforseen difficulties, but no cause for alarm.

“Please,” said General Beatrix, gracefully indicating the open chair across from her.

The General was newly ascended to her position and Squall could just barely recognize her from a few years ago in Timber, when he had helped with infiltration into insurgent homes. He mostly recognized her missing eye and the lance-like blade. She had a familiar no-nonsense air to her, though he hadn’t really known her.

He sat wordlessly, leaning his back against the chair and crossing his arms. The habits that made him a killjoy in Balamb made him a loose cannon in the Galbadian army; closed posture, pausing before he spoke, not responding with thanks to every gesture. They typically felt ill at ease around him, which he liked.

“You’ve come at a fortunate time,” she said, dismissing a few members of her guard with a flick of her fingers at one or the other. They were left with only a few in audience, mostly those who had been working before he came in. “We’ve been dealing with constant skirmishes for the past forty-eight hours, and you happened to find a time of relative quiet.”

“It’s that frequent?”

“Yes. My estimation is that the insurgents are riding off the wave of adrenaline that the start of violence and initial success provides and are pushing out as much violence as they can to keep us busy. I think the skirmishes will begin to slow starting tonight.”

She may well be right. She was also being surprisingly open about the flaws of their military for a Galbadian officer. “You said they were successful?”

“At taking possession of Dingo Desert Prison,” Beatrix clarified, a sort of low grinding in her voice becoming more apparent as a drop of emotion slipped through. She sounded like her vocal cords had been damaged before. The very low voice was likely the most comfortable for her. “An astonishing victory. In retrospect, not surprising.”

"No?”

Beatrix then dispassionately described to him how they had been unravelling the uncomfortable truth that these rebels had been working on working their way into prison staff for almost six years, getting moles hired, pushing through release orders for their jailed allies, making maps, planting cameras and wires in the walls. Because of this effort, taking the prison when the day come had been remarkably easy—and, harrowingly, the army got much of this information because the missile base they were sitting in had very nearly suffered the same fate. Beatrix herself had been sent in from the capital to cull the ranks of traitors and spies with a team of building inspectors and inquisitors who uncovered a staggeringly massive web of deceit, plants, and sabotaged equipment. “Galbadia was closer than we ever were before to having missile aimed at her very heart,” she continued blithely. “It was half luck and half sleepless nights that has won us back the base you sit in.”

‘Holy fucking Hyne’ was what was really on his tongue. “Commendable,” he managed to say instead.

“The fact that this group is so long-established and dug in means that uprooting it is proving a task,” she continued, gracefully refusing an offered glass of clear liquid with a flicker of her nails. Squall refused as well. “Even more so because it has to remain absolutely confidential how very deep this rot goes. That a rebel group has succeeded in any capacity cannot be public knowledge.”

In Deling’s Galbadia? Absolutely not. “How did such an extensive group escape notice for so long?”

“It didn’t,” she assured him. “The factors that led to their tolerated existence made sense at the time.”

“Because of the involvement of Caraway’s daughter?”

“Goodness, no,” she scoffed. “Heartilly has been on the kill on sight list for almost ten years. This group became an insurgent central, after some time; there are a few charismatic resistance figures that dissidents tend to gravitate toward, who have a lot of sway in the black market and underworld. The core of this rebel group was allowed to survive because black market arms dealers, political radicals, drug lords, and spies would all gravitate to them eventually, and could be snapped up the second they did.”

“Association with these guys proves guilt,” he summarized.

“Precisely. Very many potential problems were nipped in the bud when contact with this rebel group was confirmed. But it was an oversight to not crush them years ago nonetheless. What’s done is done; now, we have to get their prison base away from them and their commander captured.”

“Heartilly?”

“No,” Beatrix said, and an expression of complicated frustration crossed her brow as she looked off. “Yes, we need Heartilly. The consensus is… the assumption is that she really is a sorceress. There is still a margin of error, but it appears true.

“But who we NEED is their commander.

“This is an unknown person,” she confided. “But we know they have been operating for a long time. We’ve had a profile on them without a name for years. They have… distinct… and effective methods. Hit and run. They’ve left a string of big heists and raids in their path that all share some tactical characteristics. And having examined the file on this unknown person, I am personally convinced that they are the person now working with Heartilly to run the rebel operation. The gall of infiltrating and storming a prison and a missile base matches up to their methods perfectly. I’ll be providing you with the file so you can see how I came to my conclusions,” she assured him. “But I feel sure we’re looking at the master plan of a long-time dissident who’s been attracting, consolidating, and radicalizing recruits for years. Their methods are gregarious, daring, destructive, and typically total. They are finally showing their hand with this insurgency, I believe.”

Interesting. “And you really don’t know who this person is?”

“Oh, there is a book of suspects,” Beatrix sighed. “Some are plausible. I don’t have a name I’ve set my heart on myself. But I have a profile which…” and she paused, in a moment of consideration. “…I am personally convinced that I have some details of their past sorted. I’ve had these points argued. I maintain thr knowledge that I could be wrong. But I am convinced.”

Squall nodded, a little bit intrigued.

“I am certain,” she emphasized, reassuring herself, “that this person is SeeD-trained. Their methods match closely with that of intense SeeD training, even in the heat of a heist. Though they are typically bolder and more destructive than most SeeDs I’ve worked with, I see that as the result of their descent into lawlessness.”

“…Is that so,” he muttered, a little more than a bit intrigued now.

“Many of my colleague believe our enemy commander is street-trained like most of their rabble, but happens to be very intelligent, and has discovered a knack for tactics as their planned heists became grander and grander in scope. I disagree, and I hope the file will show you why. I feel there is a trained deliberation not just in the operation of their heists, but in the organization for them; the planning of when, where, and why any one will be undertaken, to gather resources, people, and social opinion of a bigger plan. This plan. And I believe their methods of infiltration, manipulation and influence shows a military training not known in street fighters.”

This woman had never walked on a street in her life. The average cardshark on a barrel outside of a bar or prostitute desperate for dinner had a tactical brain that would astound her. But he’d bite. “Sounds like way too much of a job for someone Garden-employed.”

“Garden-trained,” she clarified. “Not currently employed. Though it’s not common, SeeDs do defect, desert, or go MIA.”

They absolutely did. They had an MIA list of respectable length in Xu’s office which didn’t get a name scratched off of it often. “It’s possible,” he told her. “We’ve had trouble with rogue SeeDs before.” He figured that a person with a brain could reason that semi-independent professional war criminals went rouge sometimes, it wasn’t exactly top secret.

She nodded, considering her point proven. “The very fact that we don’t know this person’s name or face is one of the main things that makes me suspect a SeeD,” she admitted. “Army officers, street thugs, seasoned rebels, and champion boxers alike want fame, for their name to be first. Garden SeeDs are some of the only masters of tactical humility known to me. A SeeD who assassinates a great leader or turns the tide of the war takes extra pains to be invisible; the less well-known you are, the more likely you are to get a good assignment next time.”

…Spot on. SeeDs were not supposed to be recognizable. They were supposed to blend in wherever they were hired. She had a point.

“They could, of course, also be a long-time insurgent, or even a prisoner themselves who learned the value of keeping out of the spotlight long ago. I admit this is possible. But I feel it is SeeD. This is why I wanted a SeeD operative to assist.”

Ah. So, Deling HADN’T asked for him. Considering, actually, that Garden hadn’t known Galbadia was at war, it was possible that Deling was hoping to get the whole thing out of the way with Garden ever hearing about it. He was confident he could crush the rebels without help; it was this General sitting across from him, straight-baked in the gloom, who felt otherwise.

But that made him wonder. If Deling was going so far out of his way to not inform Garden about or hire SeeD for this rebellion, and the rebels themselves had enough cash, supplies, and clout to take over a base location, then why wouldn’t they hire SeeDs themselves, especially since they wouldn’t be dealing with a competitive price bracket? Deling wasn’t making a market for them to compete in. They could have just swept in a hired a dozen of them cheap, unless—

—they really didn’t want the Garden to know about them either. Because their Commander was an MIA SeeD who had gone native.

Damn. She was right.

“What are my orders?” he asked, to indicate that he had enough information.

“Choose your quarters, settle in, get some rest,” she shrugged, “it’s almost midnight. Ignore it if any fighting crops up tonight, I want you deployed at dawn to the prison. Your main goal is to determine who this Commander is, their chain of command, their hierarchy. Names, faces, positions, abilities. Obviously, the end goal is to capture and contain them, but unless you have a golden opportunity at first flush, I want your first mission to be obtaining identities and reporting back.”

Intel immediately. That wasn’t her best call, not that she could know that. However, if this was an MIA SeeD, unless they were an old-school Galbadia Garden walkout from the time of the Timber rebellion, Squall was likely to already know who they were. Even then, he had seen their MIA list enough times that he’d have a shot.

Of course, whether or not she had gotten the lousiest spy in Balamb’s upper command wasn’t hers to know. “Understood,” he said, with a brief nod. “How far down their command chain should I investigate?”

“As much as can be done in a day,” she said. “I have had no success getting my own men in. I’ve had great success getting my men to defect, apparently, which is information I did not divulge and will NOT hear repeated. I require the name and identity of the Commander. The rest I will take gladly. And I advise,” she added, tapping a finger on the wood of the table as an afterthought occurred, “not engaging with the sorceress if unnecessary.”

If it wasn’t ordered, it wasn’t necessary. Simple. “Understood,” he said, and moved to stand.

No, he wasn’t dismissed. But she wasn’t his commanding officer. That was and always would be Xu. And Xu hadn’t told him to be polite this time. She had told him to get it done. “Will that be all for tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Steiner will show you your options for quarter, pick what serves you best. Oh, and Steiner, swing him by the mess. I forgot about eating again,” she admitted, shuffling some papers without looking at them. A memory trick, probably. “Your driver will wake you in the morning.”

No, they wouldn’t, but they could feel free to fetch him. “Understood.”

—

“You’re KIDDING me,” said Perch, a simple girl from Fisherman’s Horizon, as she nervously fiddled with the cherry on a toothpick resting on the rim of her barely-sipped old fashioned.

“Not in the least,” said General Caraway, slumped back in his own armchair in his own house, hand resting beside an equally fussed-with old fashioned. “Not a word from her, not one, since she left ten years ago.”

“And just because she went off to be her own girl, live her own life, make her own choices,” Perch drawled in that FH fashion that took its time and made stops on the way, “Now you’re cooped up just because you raised her? That ain’t right, I would say.”

“It’s how things are done,” Caraway sighed, hedging his bets. “I know your hometown has no need for these kind of complicated situations, but we do here. I understand why I am under observation—my innocence in her scheming will come to light with time.”

Fat chance, thought Selphie, where only Gogo and Cerberus could hear her. She would, in fact, say that Caraway had settled on the unpleasant truth that his best chance for getting out of this with his head on his shoulders was to wait for his daughter’s army to be crushed, her hopes extinguished, and herself either killed or captured as enemy of the state without him looking her way. Selphie had no children of her own (and was a notorious houseplant murderer to boot) but she just couldn’t quite square it.

Still. He looked pretty fucking crushed. So, she wasn’t judging him too harshly yet.

“All cause she’s a—sorceress?” asked Perch, stumbling over the word.

Caraway shook his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding as tired as though he were triple his fifty years. “I just don’t know. My Rin? Daughter of a General and a bar girl? In my heart… I feel like she’s being put up to it. I… my girl…”

“Aw, it’s no thing,” Perch soothed him, clearly nervous to let the conversation get to heavy. After all, she followed a dead-looking middle-aged man into his own home and accepted a drink; let’s not let anything get too hairy. She had just come in because he looked like he needed cheering up, after all. “Listen, why don’t you tell me what she was like as a little one? Truth comes out when you look to the children, they would say at home. Course that’s because kids were willing to spill the beans for the gossip they had heard around town when the rest of us kept it shut, but it’s true still.”

A tired, fond, sad smile broke on Caraway’s face, and Selphie took care not to too obviously settle in for a long, long debriefing.

—

He had been asleep for not quite three hours.

It wasn’t some Guardian’s ability, by the way, that told him that, or some kind of SeeD training that made him capable of internally logging the hours. He always could do that. Never knew how to explain it. He knew what time it was, how long he had slept. And he was a light fucking sleeper, too. Always had been. It was the main reason he had worked so hard as a teen to banish all roommates from his life. Even someone flipping on the light switch, jiggling the door handle, opening their own fucking door across the hallway, could jolt him awake. It was worse outside of his own bed, away from his blackout curtains, his exact temperature control, and his fairly warned neighbors.

(And Quistis. Her comforting, clean scent. Her soft, slow, calm breathing. Being there, when he startled awake, so be exactly what he expected, her hand curled under her pillow, her jaw clenched, her eyelids flickering. Frustrated even in her dreams.)

All that being said, it is understandable that the screeching explosion of a bunker buster against the side of a wall near him did wake him up.

It wasn’t any of the four walls he was sleeping inside of, but it was damn close, and it was DAMN loud. He swung out of bed, grabbed his blade, grabbed his jacket with his blade, chucked it into his other hand and was out the door. Technically, it had been drilled into his head to grab the blade and NOTHING else (he had watched girls get deducted points ten times in a row as they were unable to break themselves of grabbing their purses, which, if they could do it in .2 seconds, what was the issue) but he fucking hated being cold. Anyway, he didn’t pause to put it on, he tucked it under his left arm like he was picking up a teddy bear to carry out of bed with him and was out the door.

Smoke was billowing into the left side of the hall; he took the right. When the soldiers started pouring out of their rooms two seconds after he was out of his, they ran towards the explosion; they were trained that way. SeeD were supposed to get a look at the situation first and foremost; he wasn’t supposed to die as a meat shield, he was supposed to leave the meat shields behind him and find the bomber. Couldn’t do that while smoke-blind.

He was winging down a corner and almost to a side door when another explosion shook the building, as luck would have it, a little farther away. But it wasn’t luck, he amended to himself as he struck the door with his shoulder and the friction of the shaking building bounced it open; the room he had been sleeping in was a ‘guest’ room, meaning it was about as far away from the actual meat, potatoes, and missiles of the base as a person could get. The house commanders, like Beatrix, would have been sleeping very close to the insurgent’s actual targets, where he was far away.

That meant he could find a clear shot to come at the bombers. And ‘shot’ was going to be the operative word here, he figured. If they were nailing the complex from tanks or cars, he was going to find a barrier, get behind it, and use the gun half of the gunblade for once. He lightly touched the presence of Shiva (as if rising away to a cold and comforting memory in the back of his mind for a second) before rushing into the glittering, icy desert night, as bitter cold as the artic and much, much darker.

He found it in him to pull on his jacket as he took a wide circle around the complex to the side he was assuming the bombers were on. The darkness would be working for him this time. The attackers were staring into the shock and awe of their blasts, clashing shrapnel, and he had his night-eyes ready. It was dizzyingly, country-bright above, with a slit moon and a cascade of starlight. White sparks, everywhere.

It was when he finally spotted what he thought was a mass of insurgents around the corner (they were standing in tactical positions, rather than ordered formations) and ducked behind the wall to come up with his strategy that he remembered Beatrix’s order that he stay put for any violence and let the army handle it. He didn’t think Beatrix had assumed her walls would be breached before dawn, though. And it would be insane to try to get any rest with this going on, so, violence it was.

He took short looks to get the size of it. Several vehicles. But small ones. Likely bikes. Whatever was keeping the bunker busters was further back; they either got some absolute units to carry a few or are using these guys as spotters. Either way, the real target was even farther back. Clever; the soldiers that even got out of the base before the guys on bikes drove off wouldn’t be targeting the actual firepower.

Squall tucked as much of the blade out of starlight as he could (remind him why he couldn’t choose a weapon that could be sheathed again?) he took a zig-zag pattern out of the hubbub, trying to keep as much smoke between him and the insurgents as possible. It almost worked, too; he knew he was next to silent, they had their eyes on at least two locations already, and visibility was low. But there were factors working against him as well, namely that he was trying to pull of maneuvers outside of the battleground before there really was one. A few of the insurgents had engaged soldiers, and there was at least one pair of eyes scanning the horizon.

He heard a shout; his first impulse was to book it harder to get beyond the outer wall. Luckily, whoever had spotted him wasn’t a gunner. Unluckily, they were stocked up with spells. A whisper of well-aimed, angry air almost tore the sand out from under his feet. He half-stepped out of the way, took maybe a step or two back on track, then had to dodge a wide slash of fire, which had been aimed as much to give the spellcaster a look at him as actually hit him.

Now, he wasn’t fond of fire. Unfortunately, he chose to shield himself with ice, half on instinct, which took that golden firelight and fractured it around like a spinning prism. Aware what this dumbassery meant for the next few minutes of his life, he pulled his gunblade up, waited for the ice to melt, and pulled the trigger.

He thought the first bullet struck. He wasn’t dead sure, since he was trying to keep moving, keep wheeling himself closer to being behind that wall. The next strike from the spellcaster went wide; his next bullet panged against metal. Hopefully one of their bikes. He kept running out, holding his gun over one shoulder—

Then he looked away from the sand in front of him and back at the spellcaster exchanging blows with him at just the wrong time.

He saw her in his periphery, first. She reminded him of a viper. Suddenly rising from the sand, her head reared back. As if her had accidentally trod closer to her lying in her grave.

His instincts blared a siren and though he pulled the trigger at whatever sorry bastard might or might not have been in his way, his head snapped back to the front, where a something—a person—a woman was maybe a foot, likely less in front of him, face to face. Right in front of him. Sprung from the ground like a grasshopper. His arm snapped back a little since he was shooting with utterly terrible posture and her eyes reflected the light of the sparking metal like a cat’s. Wide. Repeating. No light from inside. She wasn’t big. She was standing like a ballet dancer poised still, waiting for a first note to be pulled for a dance. Utterly, deathly unmoving, practically standing on his feet.

Not many things made his nerves jangle like that. This did. She came from he wasn’t even sure where and now she was here. He didn’t even have room to pull up his gunblade, but he tried anyway. It smacked against a magical shield that held up like iron. Her face didn’t move, but her big, dark eyes flicked down to look at the weapon, catching and reflecting the shimmer off its broad face.

She didn’t appear to be saying anything, but her lips moved, staring at his gunblade. He tried to take a step back and get into an attacking position.

He just… didn’t move.

Things felt very, very still, for a second, like he had slipped into a pocket of sand in the desert that had shed itself of the noise, light, and motion that was happening all around him. Or like it had all slowed around this woman, blurring low and dark like around a black hole. Her eyes snapped back up to his face.

“Are you Squall Leonhart?” she asked, the sweetest, softest, most curious little voice.

He either couldn’t or didn’t speak in return. It wasn’t quite clear.

“I’m Sorceress Rinoa,” she told him, quirking her head like a child to the side, pointing at her own face. Those her skin was pale, somehow, she was dark, though she stood right before him. It didn’t make sense. It was like his eyes were failing to perceive something standing between the two of them.

With a snarl in his heart if not on his lips, which felt anesthetic-numb, he preformed the strange motions of turning his mind through layers of consciousness to touch Diablos. To turn whatever this woman was into a shadow underneath him.

Her brow flickered with annoyance. “Stop it,” she said.

He buried his mind deeper in the layers (like he was going into strata of rock) and called for Shiva.

Her mouth opened again, though if it said something, the words blurred and faded like the stars that suddenly swerved above his head, as she raised her arm.

And touched him, he thought.

—

It is, technically, impossible to explain what Squall ‘does’ as a guardian force master.

He made up the title. He would be pretty surprised to find another one in the world or someone who felt up to taking up the title after him. It was, he would say, if asked (again) to explain it, kind of like being a dog person instead of a person person. His ‘dogs’ were just divine, alien beings.

He ‘kept’ his and he ‘carried’ others with him. He ‘matched’ people to the guardians that would best ‘fit’ them and ‘gave’ them away. He ‘found’ and ‘won’ them. And all of those verbs were said with a certain uneasiness because none of the things he did resembled things done to physical objects with human hands. He did next to nothing that could be felt, seen, categorized, or acknowledged, except when it was time to vaporize someone.

He would tell people to access and contact their guardians with their minds and pretend like they were entreating, courting, and controlling them in a mental space, but even that was an interface through which the real interaction with the guardians was done. It wasn’t even in the mind, like dreams or thoughts. It was something else still, more transient, more strange.

Personally, he thought of it as if he were a creature of the ocean, a little drifting jellyfish, suddenly given the power to look ‘up’ (though he had no eyes before) so that he may treat with the birds, whose calls, flights, patterns did not penetrate through the water separating them, but whose shadows he could see drifting through the waters around him.

He was perceiving, through a sense he wouldn’t call natural to humankind, the movements and emotions of creatures that were moving in a plane he didn’t typically have access to. They lent him, and the others they made pacts with, a sort of extra-sensory access (unrelated to other senses) to the very barest effects of their existence, the powers which they could make manifest in the world that humans actually lived in. But the space they truly inhabited, above, beyond, around him and the rest of humankind, Squall didn’t actually ‘touch’ it.

It wasn’t his mind he used to contact, interact with, employ that strange fabric of a plane he was not native to, but he told other SeeDs to understand it that way. There weren’t many people comfortable with admitting they had opened up their body to a process meant for alien, inhuman, unapproachable beings, had their powers and influence spilled into them like sunlight filling the eyes under shut lids, and that this phenomenal invasion served to enable them to be BAD at handling guardian forces.

Because no one was good at it. Not even him. He was better at it than (so far) everyone else. But he was still using inhuman tools through an inhuman process he had jerry-rigged up an interface to interact with in a semi-spiritual form of mashing every fucking button on the console of a machine he had never seen before. He had just memorized what a couple buttons did through trial and error, honestly.

He would then use his indescribable divine intuition to matchmake alien forces to new recruits, smack them together, and say, please believe that the guardian’s place of residence is your head. Please don’t think too hard beyond that. You will break yourself if you think too far beyond that. And your new friend WILL fill in the cracks.

So, anyway, he woke up with his teeth chattering like he was dying of the cold, the muscles in how body screaming like he had been seizing, his eyes wide open though it seemed he had just been asleep, under wheeling, swirling stars in a frigid night. And, just like he was no longer lying next to Quistis, he wasn’t ‘touching’ Shiva.

He tried to say her name out loud. His teeth almost chattered on his tongue. What was happening to his body? His muscles were all so tight and sore. Drugged? Had he been drugged? He could move his legs, but they hurt. It was like he was trying to stretch everything too far. He was dressed. There was that. But he was fucking freezing.

He called Shiva’s name again, with his voice, and in a way that resonated inside.

—above she opened her ear—

The sensation hurt in the bones of his hands. Like he had tried to touch something they were too soft to hold. He winced and his jaw hurt so bad. He must have been stiff as a corpse, whatever had just been happening. He called for Shiva again.

—From the great above she—

It hurt. That was how best he could describe the sensation. “Shiva,” he said again, and forced himself up on to the palm of his hands, his hair hanging stringy and sweaty in his face.

—the great below! From the great above the goddess—

“Shiva, please.”

—From the great above she opened her ear to the great below.

From the great above the goddess opened her ear to the great below!

The Lady abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.

Shiva abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.

Squall.

She could hear him. He left out a hard breath and dipped almost half a foot to the ground. Nearly collapsed, actually. “Where were you? What happened?” he asked, out loud, seeing no one to hear him speak.

Not like humans, Shiva whispered, coming to him like the wind cutting in, are sorceresses, and not like myself either. It’s hard to say.

He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. Just as her actions weren’t just like actions, her words weren’t quite like words. The translation he scraped together didn’t capture the proper multidimensional picture they were probably painted in. With some effort, he put an elbow under his body so he could sit up. He saw, with a little discomfort, that his gunblade had been laid at his feet, perpendicular, like the possessions of a war casualty. “Was I left for dead?”

I’m not certain, she told him, even, amused. Not like anything, are sorceresses. My perception of you was cut. For some time, your body changed. I’m not certain what happened.

No, he didn’t like this at all. Staring at his hands again, he found that they looked like hands, that they felt the grains of sand under them, that they strained to hold his uneven weight. He brought himself up to his knees. “Well. What I do know now is that there is a sorceress, and it is Rinoa Heartilly.” And that I doubt one SeeD is a match for one of those, he added, silently, though there was no one around to hear his anxiety.

As he got to his feet, slowly easing the tension out of his muscles, he checked on Diablos and Carbuncle. The process was much the same, excepting the differences in their behavior. Talking to Diablos was much more… total, for lack of a better descriptor. He tended to lose his eyesight while Diablos was ‘speaking’ to him. Senses shaded and dulled as Diablos’ voice filled up perception. Carbuncle, who was a divine coward, spoke like a voice singing from the other room, a song that plucked on your memory. They were there. The guardians he was ‘carrying,’ waiting for the proper person to ‘junction’ them, they were still scattered around him, his constellation, his invisible halo of pressure. He picked up his gunblade and checked to see if it was loaded.

No, but he was pretty sure he had shot most of those bullets, actually. There were a few shoved into the pockets of his jacket, which he pulled out with trembling fingers and loaded into the barrel.

Unfortunately, not all of the cold that permeated his body was magical or psychological. It was still night in the desert; he would guess about an hour before sunrise. But that hour could be deadly, since it wouldn’t warm up until that sun did rise. And then it would warm up fast but, until then, it was too cold for a human, and he had already been passed out (or something?) in that cold for. God. Too long.

Magical fire would help a little. He made some flicker around him and stared, sightless, into the dancing air.

More important, though, was keeping moving. Though he had to decide which way.

He had gone several minutes into calculating what direction he thought he had been dragged in, based on the sky and what he could see of the horizon, the direction of the wind, other stupid environmental shit, and how that would get him back to the base, when he suddenly had another thought. A worse one.

Why not go right to the rebel base? He was almost as sure as Beatrix now that a SeeD, or former SeeD, was helping run the operation. And if they were still as much of a SeeD for the asshole tactics he had just seen employed against the troops, they might just be enough of a SeeD for private negotiations, active violence or not.

SeeDs were always SeeDs. Above, to the side of, not really part of the conflicts they were paid to complicate.

Besides, he was pretty sure he had an idea of where the prison was.

It was probably where the barrel fires were burning a couple miles off.

—

Original Note:

Shiva recited the beginning of the Descent of Inanna, an early example of mythic poetry that tells the story (partially lost) of the heavenly Goddess descending into the underworld to challenge the power of her cthonic sister. Why did I choose this? Partly to give Shiva that Goddessly shine, partly because I love the myth, partly for the fun and weird connotation of her calling Squall's world 'the underworld.' It felt weird and out-of-place in a way I liked. It makes the tone of their relationship more clear.

I'm obviously using other FF characters to fill in places where a person could put an OC instead; Selphie's GF that gives her shapeshifting power is Gogo, the true MVP of FFVI, and I used Beatrix of FFIX as a ready-made Honorable General of the Evil Empire stand-in. She gets to keep her sword, and she gets a gun too. Perch, however, is a personal invention. I don't know why this happened but on my recent FFVIII playthrough I became oddly invested in the girl wearing the tiny slip dress that flirts with Squall in Fisherman's Horizon while there's, like, an invasion going on. I love that attitude, that's just fucking great. Anyway that one NPC in that one scene is who Perch is supposed to be.

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A few minor incidents are to be expected in a job like this one.

Selphie was pretty uneven on her feet when she finally stumbled back into the Garden, less because she had had a few drinks (though she had) and more because it was fucking late. Really fucking late. She had spent an hour gently questioning a General about his wayward daughter, several more hours impersonating her own boyfriend in a bar (and getting WAY too close to a very weird woman’s bare tits in the process), another hour beyond that dodging through alleyways while looking like a sloppy drunk trying to follow a target into the Presidential palace, and more time than she wanted to admit hiding in a laundry chute just outside the palace after almost being caught, and about two minutes convincing someone to get her a ride back to Garden.

What was weird was that the first person she saw when falling back into the Garden was the last person she had seen before springing out.

Quistis was sitting on a bench outside of the front entrance, her legs tucked under her, her hair down and dressed in a daydress. She had a laptop computer out and was ticking away at what Selphie assumed was a spreadsheet.

She had to have already noticed Selphie awkward, stumbling entrance, though she seemed content to keep typing away as Selphie passed her. But kind of concerned that Quistis was awake at the same hour as her, Selphie stood in front of her and asked “what’re you doing up right now?”

“Enjoying the sunrise,” Quistis said, placidly.

Selphie looked nervously at the sky again. Dark. “It isn’t sunrise yet.”

“It will be soon,” Quistis informed her, tapping her nails on the side of her computer as she visibly tried to come to a choice about her work on the screen.

“Seriously?” Selphie asked, shooting a look at the sky again, like it could answer for itself.

“Are you still up?” asked Quistis, clearly knowing the answer.

“Yeah…” Selphie shrugged her shoulders, feeling a bit exhausted and just a little bit proud. “Spent half the night as Irvine barhopping and integrating,” she sighed, finally flopping down in the bench next to her.

“Will Irvine get to know where he was last night?” asked Quistis with a little smile.

“I’m just hoping Irvine was actually here last night!”

“No idea.”

“Never saw him?”

“Not since this afternoon.”

“Hope he’s not doing something stupid,” Selphie hoped, futilely. She privately thought that her boyfriend had the highest rescue-needed rate in the Garden. But in his defense, that was part of being a thin, gangly, civilian-dressed sniper who was SUPPOSED to have backup at all times. “I’ll have to look and see if he’s in bed…”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Quistis told her, doing a rapid double-tap to move about ten gigs of data from one screen to a compiler.

She was vicious with a laptop. A lot of them weren’t allowed to use the new machines, considering how easily they could snap or their screens could break. Quistis defended her machine (and the data on it) with her life and could now use it to make enemies and influence people with a rapidity Selphie thought was a little sexy. Privately.

“I got a question for you, though,” she said, propping her tired head onto one of her hands. Ah, her own head, and her own hands. It felt so nice.

Quistis raised an eyebrow and, as a gesture of intimate and long-lived friendship, closed the document she had been working on. “Yes?” she asked, flickering her shaded eyes at Selphie under the reflective glow of her glasses.

“Why’d you think Squall might be under investigation?”

It was, perhaps, late enough for her to ask that question. Or perhaps it had stuck out in her thoughts, like an uncomfortably important paper on top of a messy desk. Either way, it had still been just behind her mouth when she saw Quistis again, tapping at her teeth to get out. And she had let it out, even thought it was terrible strategy to just go for the throat with a delicate question like that, because—these were her friends.

A look of dull pain crossed Quistis’s face. She placed the tips of three fingers on the cover of the laptop and, with seeming effortlessness, clicked it shut.

—

It was getting on to morning, Squall had walked several miles in the cold, sometimes granting himself a few delicate flames to warm his hands, when he found himself having to decide HOW he approached this prison.

He had definitely FOUND it. This fucker was huge. It was a three-pronged, twisted skyscraper that had to have been drilled a mile into the ground to be standing as solidly and impertinently on the whistling desert sands as it was. The entrance was as unclear as the perimeters were, and it was surrounded by what looked like the morning backwash of a really packed concert. Men and women in half-combat gear dozed or watched around barrel fires and smoking pits, wafting with the slightest scents of split bone and skin. By the scent, he figured it was food, not prisoners. Their disorganized groupings, the buffed steel of the prison, the scattered munitions and untouched makeshift breakwalls—all of it told him that it hadn’t been attacked by Galbadian forces yet, and they weren’t expecting to be attacked any time soon.

He had started doing a relaxed perimeter of the whole prison, looking for his best approach, when he noticed the whisper of something odd. Some kind of tension, like the air was humming. As he moved, it was like he had to shift the air around him like he was swimming; it worsened as he reached closer to the prison.

There was some kind of tangible aura. A presence, a wrapping. Instinct told him it was a massive spell, but logic balked at the scale of it.

He started skirting it, a slightly closer circle than he had been winding. And it turned out that it wasn’t a perfect circle around the thing; there was a perihelion and aphelion of it, it seemed, as though the center was not the building itself, but a non-uniform spot inside of it. And at that perihelion, he found, to his shock and approval, a tightly bundled and well-hidden group of Galbadian soldiers.

Squall approached the rifle barrel that was swiftly pointed at him with an assumptive ease. And as expected, it was lowered without a word when he was properly in view.

They were all behind a car pushed onto its side, likely broken down and repurposed as a wind break, whose silent shade masked their presence from the people inside the ring in the growing dawn.

The group of soldiers so hidden numbered four. Two infantrymen with suspicious and narrowed gazes, a female technician with no armor and a rifle strapped to her back, and General Beatrix.

“General,” Squall muttered, as quietly as he could, and crouched to accept Beatrix’s handshake in greeting.

“Leonhart,” she said, with an equal kind of surprised respect. “Thank you for joining us.”

“Against your orders,” he reminded her as he sat down.

“You wisely realized that my orders were not sufficient for the situation last night turned in to,” Beatrix said with an almost criminal nonchalance. “Besides, I asked you to leave the defense of the base to us and turn your thoughts to infiltrating the prison, which you have done. Now, Operative, how are we getting in here?” she asked, barely looking away from the glittering structure which had surely been burned into her vision by now.

Squall let himself pause to think about it, taking in the building, the strange aura around it, the scattered troops, their casual morning indifference. “I don’t have a read on what the magical field around it is,” he admitted straight out, thought he did believe it was very similar to what Carbuncle did. “May I ask first what your goals are today?”

“Same as the orders I gave you,” Beatrix reiterated. “We absolutely need the commander in custody, or the sorceress, or both.”

They had been forced into a scattered offensive. How badly had the previous night gone after he had been knocked out? If it was as bad as it looked right now with a red sun just glittering over the sands, this was maybe the worst Deling had ever seen. It seemed surreal, improbable, on a day in which very few people even knew Galbadia was at war. It was the same feeling that waking up to a brand-new mountain range in the distance would be.

“Do you want to contain them in the missile base, Deling City, or an unspecified location?” Squall asked.

“Commander, Deling for questioning. Sorceress, nearest possible secure location to blow her head off.”

Where is Irvine when you need him was a stupid question that Squall loved to keep asking himself. But a small team, a ridiculous task, and a shifting objective was also his own element, in a way.

“Okay, are any of you a sniper?”

The tech support shook her head; one of the infantrymen jostled the other, and he pulled a face. “Not—ugh,” said the jostled one. “Not a great one.”

“I myself am a close-range specialist,” Beatrix said.

Right, then. “We have a better chance of targeting their commander. If I’m going to ride on the assumption that they’re a SeeD”—and they had better be—“The plan is to draw them out by implementing a basic training SeeD infiltration strategy that they are sure to know. If our movements are recognizable enough and they become aware that SeeD are infiltrating them, they are likely to try to come to root out the problem themselves, instead of wasting men on us.” He assumed. It was a SeeD’s pattern after all—assume you are the best and most valuable and act as though you are. “After encountering the commander we have a few option, but honestly, all of them involve a vehicle, so my advice is to let me do what it takes to contain them while the rest of your focus on whatever one of those—” he said, with a sweep at the rebel’s lot of parked cars—“you think you can wire, start, and drive with the best efficiency.”

Beatrix glanced at the tech, who nodded, her face grim but her eyes set on the lot. The General herself sighed and flexed her fingers on the pistol that had never left her hand.

“Fill us in on the details of this infiltration plan,” she said.

—

“We’ve know each other,” said Quistis, “And Squall for a long time.”

Uh oh, thought Selphie, immediately, wondering if maybe she shouldn’t have sprung for having this conversation before she slept after all.

“So we both know he has the tendency to bottle things up.”

“Bottle things up? He’s a one-man emotions brewery and he’s got a cork in them six inches deep.”

“…More or less,” Quistis said, pretending she didn’t think that was funny. “But you and I both know that he feels quite a bit, really, he just values his appearance of inapproachability.”

“He likes to feel like other people’s emotions aren’t his problem. He’s not good at handling them, and he knows that, so he’d rather not be counted on for it. It’s insecurity,” Selphie argued, much less charitably.

“Alright,” Quistis said, just a hair annoyed. “I know he has his issues. So do the rest of us.”

“Sure.”

“I agree he has insecurities,” she sighed, holding her laptop over her knees. “I know some of them need worked on. But he does value his privacy, too. He’s an introvert. He’s someone who needs to spend most of his time in peace and quiet. He’s…” she trained off, then used two fingers to push her glasses back up her knows. “…There’s been a problem that started showing up, recently.”

“Uh huh?”

“Past few years, really,” Quistis admitted, looking off. “The sort of thing that becomes more apparent as time goes on.”

“Is this something you should have told me about ages ago?” asked Selphie, sotto voce.

“Probably?” Quistis sighed. “It snuck up on us. It seemed natural. I didn’t realize how much of a problem it was becoming… this is something that could seriously handicap his work, Selphie. Of course I didn’t want it getting around.”

“—Is he losing his head?” asked Selphie.

“No! Well. No, not like that,” Quistis assured her quickly. “He doesn’t forget things. He’s sharp. It’s… emotional. Somehow. It’s definitely emotional.”

“He was shellshocked?”

“Selphie, let me speak,” Quistis sighed, and Selphie drew a single cold finger across her lips. “Thank you.”

Selphie nodded.

“Something has been starting to go… wrong in his head.”

—

The net was one of the most basic infiltration tactics a SeeD was taught, and one of the nastiest. Squall was hoping that any former SeeD worth their salt would be offended that someone would do it to them.

It was a fast-acting plan, it was versatile, and it was absolutely fucking buckwild. No one liked doing it, and Beatrix should have slapped him for suggesting it, but she didn’t know to.

The strength of the net is that you could have several targets, that it was movable and versatile, and that you could use your own intellect instead of waiting for exact orders from your commander. The weakness was that, in a way, every man was on his own. And people died doing it. It didn’t have the safeties that sneaking in with a uniform and forged papers had. It was a firestorm, immediately.

The operation of the net was this: points in a grid, as if on the interesting weave of a fishing-net, were decided on a battlefield. They were uniform; in this case, Squall ‘drew’ the net for them between the three legs of the prison, with midpoints between them, imaginary lines intersecting the midpoints and intersections, sweeping out past the legs and into widening circles around the prison. Each man had a starting point on the net that they ran to take, and they went in blazing . The successful operation of the net worked on fear. “Takes heads,” he summarized, quoting Quistis.

When each one reached his first point, they zig-zagged. “ Never stay still. Never go in a straight line for long, but keep this essential web in your mind.” Each man kept shooting all the while; absolutely unpredictable movements, absolute application of force. “As we keep zig-zagging around the circle, we focus our movements around, but nor perfectly around, a central point. If we were trying to slaughter everyone, it could be the center. If we had a front door, I’d say the front door. But we’re going to focus our movements, eventually, on the car. This is so that, whether we draw the commander out or not, we can get a vehicle and try again, instead of all dying this morning.”

The tech girl would immediately break for the car. The rest of them would circle it, mapping their prescribed points, to eventually reach it at around the same time, but in a chaotic pattern.

“Why make sure we hit the exact points?” asked Beatrix, after he had emphasized it a few too many times.

“Two reasons,” he continued, his voice a monotone. “To keep anyone from completely losing their cool in the chaos. You have the next place to go to, at all times, and can focus on that, without getting predictable. You just have to choose the next line on the net to race on and the next point to get to. And second, because it should be dead obvious to any SeeD watching from above,” he said, pointing at the doors that stood on top of massive towers three stories off the ground, “that someone’s trying to tie a goddamn net down there, and the audacity of it should incite them.”

“Understood,” said Beatrix, in a grim tone of voice that told him she understood how insane this method was. “How much time are we giving for the net to draw out this Commander?”

“At least until you can get the car started up. After that, someone will inevitably find themselves right at the car while zig-zagging. Book it when that happens. It sounds chaotic, but it usually falls into place naturally.”

And chaotically. But naturally.

All three of the underlings obviously weren’t sure about this, but this was the Galbadian army. They would never, ever question authority, not until the moment the bullet was ripping through them.

“Do you see the net?” he asked the four of them, hoping they were pretty visual learners.

Whether they were or they weren’t, they nodded.

“Ten,” said Squall. “Nine.”

—

“I think I first really noticed something was going on when he tore into the new SeeD after they messed up their footing in a duel,” Quistis said.

“That was hilarious!”

“To everyone who wasn’t the green SeeD, sure,” Quistis admitted. “I’m sure everyone had a great time watching the quiet GF master lose his head. But Squall wasn’t okay about it. I figured that out fast.

“And he wouldn’t give me an answer, for days, why he had taken so many hard strikes at the SeeD. I asked, and then I waited, as he went about his life like nothing was wrong, and waited. Finally, after three days of thinking about a response, he started talking to me. In the dead of night. Not looking at me.

“He said he had battlelust.”

Selphie paused to consider her response. “That happens to quite a few career soldiers.”

“Of course it does. And that’s what I told him,” Quistis continued, slightly leaned forward over the computer on her lap. “And he said that it wasn’t just being aggressive. It wasn’t just needing to fight. It wasn’t a sort of willful sadism. He claimed his thoughts about it hadn’t changed. But he loses control of himself. It’s very specific. It’s not long-range shooting. It’s not practicing with a dummy. It’s not reciting training manuals. It’s being in close range, facing someone.

“He loses it. I don't even know... He said it sneaks up like drunkenness and then he’s... Barely conscious. Barely running his body. And when he’s done, he said, he doesn’t feel anything.”

“…Hyne, Quistis,” Selphie marveled, jaw appropriately dropped. “That’s…”

“He doesn’t control it, and when he tried to alleviate it, he couldn’t,” Quistis went on, dull. “And finally he had realized that this wasn’t going to be confined by rules or the boundaries of a mission. When the battlelust took hold, it was willing to take anyone. You know what he said to me? ‘I would have cut down that kid and felt nothing. It was an accident that I didn’t.’ That’s what he said!

“…And he does feel bad about it, Selphie. He does. But it takes hours. It takes all night for the grief and remorse to settle into him. Because he’s gone so deep into whatever it is. It takes hours to crawl back out.

“I could have gone on to him for days about how this jeopardizes his position and the integrity of the Garden itself," she continued, with a comforting spark of annoyance. "Obviously, it didn’t. But I found myself recommending him for less-combat heavy jobs. Infiltration. Recon. He’s good at it. We pushed forward the grant to let him travel to Centra to study and acquire those weird guardians. I didn’t want to face it, but I was compromising our work, twisting things around to accommodate the danger that was leaking in.

“If he can’t be trusted to keep in composure in active combat, Selphie, what does it mean? A part of me is telling me to retire him. There’s no shame in it. SeeD retire young if they don’t die young. We all say it.

“But retire? Squall? Seriously? Then I start negotiating myself. This affects his work one time in a hundred, right? Is this so serious an issue that you’re going to strip him of everything he’s worked for because of it? …and he likely wouldn’t do it if I asked. He’ll usually let me make the choices, but not something like this.

“But this is a problem with a killcount. And he can’t handle it. It’s not a problem most of the time, sure. But when it is a problem, he has no recourse. There’s just nothing he can do. And watching him wake up to what he’s done… is…”

Quistis’s eyes set with a stubborn coldness that told Selphie that she was pushing the tears away, that she knew she was in danger of fragility right now, and she wouldn’t humor it.

“…So what are you doing?” she asked, hearing how quiet she sounded.

—

“One,” said Squall, and hit the sand with his heel so he could spring forward onto the next foot.

He wasn’t actually a fan of diving in ‘guns blazing.' He preferred to wait a shot and see how people reacted. In this case, a handful of the enemy reacted quickly, snapping their heads to the direction of the first shots fired, grabbing weapons; more startled without properly moving yet. He only saw one head scanning the horizon for a full picture, but he wasn’t looking very closely himself.

Then he started shooting. A couple shots a line; he had found a good amount on him but he wouldn’t have many bullets without being able to fire spells. It seemed to him that the barrier he pummeled through like he had smacked into cold water was a magic nullifier, and, if not a straight nullifier, probably something worse. A reflector, scrambler, confuser. In any case, he wasn’t risking magic until they were out of here.

He darted to his closed point and shot. Someone wheeled. He didn’t stay to see if they went down. His eyes had to go as fast as his feet. He saw movement on the ground and he shot. His vision wheeled when he reached a point and turned around; he saw the tech girl dutifully but slowly making her arcing way to the parked cars, the bulky rifle bouncing on her shoulder and slowing her down. Someone competent with a sword was headed her way; Squall shot them and stopped paying attention. He ran forward, hit a point, and turned.

It was direly important he focus on keeping his turns crisp, his feet on the lines his mind could see. If there was a Garden deserter up there, they had to be able to see how deliberate his movements were. He didn’t trust the Galbadians not to get caught up in the chaos, well-trained as they were. Calculated movements are enacted by muscle memory, not sheer willpower. They hadn’t done this maneuver before; probably, out of all of them, only the General had ran out on her own making her own choices in battle before. Squall fired at a burning barrel, sent it spilling sparks, and kept running.

His eyes flashed as he ran under the already-stark shadow of one of the bridges above. He was going to make a pretty wide path; ideally, he wanted to give each of the Galbadians some extra time. To feel his feet, one after another, hitting the line he made out in his head. The ground shook and trembled with running feet, as a force that outnumbered them ten to one began to rise against him.

He turned sharply. He spun the barrel of his gun.

He saw one of the infantry men out of the corner of his eye; he was firing like he was spitting curses, crazed. Squall had to point-blank someone and stumble backward. He looked forward and shot at the first person he saw; bright-haired rebel in piece-mail armor. They went down clutching an arm. He looked away, turned the corner, and kept his feet on the ground.

He had curved around one pillar, backtracked suddenly, and ducked right around another (firing as he went to people who couldn’t quite track his steps) when he felt the first one, hurtling by his cheek and into the sand. It was another few steps before he realized it; he had felt a shot from above. No time. He kept racing to the next point, fired behind him where he knew one of the pillars were just to make smoke and noise. (This is the part where his lungs always started burning. He didn’t know how long-distance runners did it.) He hit a point, turned on it; shot several times at the people who had been hiding under its shade.

Now he was getting himself into a bad spot and he knew it; and then a bullet from above almost fucking lodged itself in his back again. There was a good gunner up there. They were targeting him. He turned a corner, spun his barrel, and realized a good gunner from above was targeting him .

Winding his way he set his eyes on making it back into the sunlight; even as he was going he was turning his back to the sands, bracing the gunblade on his shoulder, and taking a one-in-a-million crackshot. He was DEAD certain he did not hit the gunner who had been firing down on him, but maybe he got close enough to let whoever it was up there that he knew they were there.

He stopped paying attention, turned around, and shot the nearest person. He saw with a bit of surprise that General Beatrix was close to him, and that she had some blood on her, then he turned and looked the other way. And as he was turning, sun in his eyes, a shot came screaming from above and nearly fucking took his ear off.

Oh. Okay. Squall braced, half-stepped backward, and unloaded at the fucking sun. Would any of them hit? Hell no. He was a good shot, not a fucking God. He had to keep running, anyway. He had to hit the next point, and he turned. There was a loud noise to his side—no fucking way, was that a car horn blaring? Already?

If he, the general, and that tech girl were all alive in the next five minutes, he was letting her know to promote her.

He slammed the butt of his blade into a big rebel that had showed up out of the nowhere as he turned, took that as a sign that he needed to start running again. If he just—

An incredibly uncomfortable growling sounded and churned, a gigantic sound and shaking at one, like one blurred, demanding sensation. The sands shifted and churned, his ears rang. He did stay on his feet, but barely, and watched with horrified awe when the pillar nearest to him, like a gigantic screw, began to turn.

Oh, fuck. They could mobilize the entire building. That thought almost stumbled him, but his worst choice would be to suddenly change the plan. He turned on his feet and kept running, kept zig-zagging. E couldn’t just make a break for the car; that would make him a sitting duck for the upwind gunner. And their shots kept striking from above like lightning, never quite hitting Squall—until one did. Shoulder. Left arm. FUCK.

It would hurt worse later. He could tell already that it wasn’t a deathwound unless he let it get infected. He kept running. Shot someone down with an arm that would be useless in the next five minutes. Turned a corner and as the building continued to grind into the earth and lower closer, closer to his head he kept aiming and firing.

Then he was forced to halt in the hot second it took for the sunlight to go dark and then flicker back above; something big was falling near him. He had to jump back, it was a command of his instincts. A man hit the ground like a landslide. He had leapt off of the building as it lowered to face Squall before he got away.

It was a very tall man. Desert-burnt. He had hair so short it was like a glimmer on his head, someone who shaved instead of styling. He wore an unbuttoned, untied, off-the-mark imitation of a Galbadian uniform, a shabby, half-shed skin like a human mimic. He could probably lift Squall and throw him and he was carrying one fucker of a weapon in his right hand.

Squall actually recognized Hyperion before he recognized its wielder. In his defense, it had changed less.

Oh , he thought. That’s Hyperion. Modified, but clearly recognizable. That sleek, beretta look. The well-maintained, tapered tip. Well, isn’t that weird.

Then he was forced, because he was about to be fucking shot by him, to get a good look at the guy.

He should have known.

—

“Ignoring it,” Quistis said, two fingers touching either side of her nose, just under her tear ducts. “We’ve been ignoring it.”

“…So,”

“If he can’t even have peace from himself out there,” Quistis interrupted, anticipating Selphie’s criticisms, “Then he’s going to have peace, and be able to relax, and feel safe with me. At least for a while.”

“…That’s kind of putting a bandage on a gushing wound, Quistis.”

“Of some kind of metaphorical wound that has no known cure,” Quistis argued, her brow furrowing in upset frustration. Selphie knew it was with, not at, her. “Quiet nights and a nice home are how you start to have mental stability. We’ve been ignoring it like you ignore grief. What the hell would you do?”

—

And he would have guessed, if the guy hadn’t been missing, presumed dead for eight years.

Vanished near the end of the Timber crisis. Went under the gunfire, his guys said. Never seen again.

Let me try to represent, albeit poorly, the millisecond mental journey Squall went on when facing up Seifer Almasy for the first time in eight years.

He saw a blade slice at his face and he felt his forehead burn and in the shining sweep of the blade he felt the echo of things that he barely remembered. A raw frustration he didn’t even have the capacity for. Sinking failure. The sensation of his face being shove into the ground. Dirt. The memory of now knowing how, or why, these words were being pulled out of him, or why he was entrusting these things to someone he—

—so much, and who didn’t deserve it. A salty scent. It could be ocean water, it could be a wash of blood. Those hands, those hands , in his hair. He suddenly remembered a Squall who had died inside him, buried by years, who had friends, who missed them, who didn’t know how to handle how things had changed between him and his brother. He remembered a Squall prepped and primed to be a match for one SPECIFIC person, a training wrapped around rivalry, tight and jealous. He remembered it with the sort of inherent revulsion with which the throat remembers bile, and squirms against it, trying to force it back down. The disgusting, embarrassing memories of a not-quite-a-man who couldn’t keep it all inside and fought it stupidly out. The pressure. The pain. The form of his body as pressed against the mold of hatred. The form of the one he hated. The relief when all he had to do was scratch and block and scrape and win. And then he cut his head open.

Seifer’s was still on his face too. A thin white line. Faded with time. He had a different, more closed stance; recklessness had earned him some extra scars Squall didn’t recall.

“Still with Deling’s dogs, in this fucking economy?” asked Seifer, his voice almost, seriously, ALMOST as nerve-prickingly nasally as it had been when they were young. “I kind of expected more from you.”

Squall noticed the vibration rising in his throat. Like an earthquake rumbled in, shifting the rock to make way.

“Or for you to have done even a little bit of looking into things before shit hit the fan. Maybe to say hello—”

It sounded good, the wind being cut by his blade, falling back to let him through.

Seifer’s hands raised as if in slow motion. He could see them coming up, their white palms, to defend himself. He turned his gun around so that the stock would hit Seifer in the stomach and rammed him.

He bounced back well and slid a leg back to brace himself; for a dizzy second Squall was practically in his arms, inches from his face, looking at how pale those eyes were and how many lines were marking their wide circles now. Then falling forward, he shot the fucking gun so that the recoil kicked into Seifer’s stomach the second he tried to take a breath in. He collapsed over him like a greedy hand.

There were fingers snarled into his hair.

Squall landed hard with his knee pinning Seifer’s thigh and everything went really fucking fast again. He drew the gun back to slam the stock into his chest. Break a fucking rib. Seifer rolled when he fell, protecting his head, and managed to weasel up his free leg to try to flip Squall off. It didn’t quite get him, but it did throw him off-balance enough for Seifer to wrench Hyperion between them, blade laid across his chest and facing up in a bare threat.

Absolutely not giving a shit, Squall stomped on his knee on his way up on to his own feet, grabbed Punishment’s hilt in both hands, and aimed to blow Seifer’s fucking chest open. Right before he could get a good shot on him Seifer arched Hyperion to mess up his shot; he fired into the sand. He loaded to fire again, looking deadass at Seifer’s heaving chest to take his aim, but he had had enough time if not to catch his air then to get his next rush of adrenaline. Seifer was up in front of him, trying to knock his feet out from under him as he went, which didn’t quite work. Instead of sliding back, which he might have done if he was running his own show right now, Squall tilted forward when he lost his balance, right onto the barely recovered Seifer; him stumbling with the surprise weight let Squall draw back to punch him in his side. It was a nasty punch. A literal low blow. He saw Seifer wince and he liked it.

He followed that up by hammering his chin with his left fist and holy shit did his shoulder scream death when he did it because, as he was now aware, Seifer had SHOT him as recently as two minutes ago, but Squall hadn’t gotten to return the favor yet. Spitting blood, he smacked his right fist back in to him instead. Seifer took a couple of blows to regain his shook balance, and when he did, he came back with an overwhelming, single-minded viciousness that snapped onto Squall like a key in a lock.

His own breath was roaring in his ears like wind in a cave as he went to the brink of death five times in thirty seconds. Seifer almost got a grip on him and sent him down. Seifer nearly punched his throat but he ducked his head and bit his hand instead. He felt skin tear as he pulled back; Hyperion got very, very close to his stomach once and he followed that up by trying to fucking rip the gunblade, blade first, out of the motherfucker’s hands.

And then General Beatrix hit him with a car.

Not hard. But definitely intentionally. He hadn’t heard the grinding wheels or squealing horn, and that was probably their last ditch attempt to get his attention as they frantically drove the car out of what was a very large, very panicked crowd now.

Whatever were the decisions that led to this moment, he was now on the hood of a car, dripping blood, disoriented, with the tip of his blade wedged through the glass of the windshield (fuck). He had to seize its hilt to hold on when they revved the gas again, and the glass cracked horrendously under his weight. He saw snapshots of the faces inside the car, red lips, white teeth, curled in terror. And he looked up and saw that the unstoppable jaskass Seifer Almasy had, in a moment of genius desperation, clenched on to the passenger side mirror of the car when it revved, let it drag him a foot, and was now climbing up next to him.

He was perhaps half as blooded as Squall was, his desecrated military jacket (patched up and pierced with spikes like a punk’s, he saw now) hanging barely on his shoulders where Squall had apparently shredded it (he didn’t remember), and his bright blue eyes were hot like ice.

Without a single thought in his head, Squall wrenched his gunblade up in front of him. There was understandable screaming, swearing, and jumping when he shattered the window all over the women in the front seat and then, as consequence of the car jolting under him, had to slam one foot down on the dashboard, shattering glass, to stay upright. Seifer whipped Hyperion up in response, his body insanely perilously perched on the curves of the car’s side as it veered over a sand dune and nearly went over completely.

Squall braced himself (on a frame studded with broken glass) to lash out with his left leg and try to kick him off entirely. He had never been the best hand-to-hand fighter; predictably, Seifer knocked it aside with his blade and took a good shot at taking his whole foot off at the ankle. Squall slammed it down inside the car instead (more completely understandable screaming as glass and hard plastic snapped) and took the harrowing steps across the breaking frame of a moving car to literally try to bury his blade in Seifer’s face. The revving car unbalanced them both again; Squall literally stuck his hand into something sharp to anchor him as Seifer grit his teeth and hauled himself up onto the back of the car.

Fuck, he was more agile than he used to be. Squall was about to go for broke and grab his ankles when the car hit its biggest, most unpleasant thud yet when it ran into, and through, what Squall belatedly understood was the magical barrier. Seifer swore with all of the air in his lungs and barely landed on the top of the car, belly down.

Squall lashed out instantly with his most thunderous, vicious, spite-fueled Ultima in his arsenal. It was no different from any other Ultima in form, but he really fucking meant it. It crushed in the roof of the car like it was paper and for a second, Squall thought he had really turned Seifer into pulp under it too.

Then they were driving away, and Seifer was in the sand ten feet away, twenty, thirty. Squall watched him, throat suddenly sore with the harshness of his breaths, plant an elbow under him (fifty feet, seventy), laboriously get up onto his chest high enough to look up (125, 150, she was really fucking stepping on it) and aim Hyperion at the car.

Squall had only just managed to open his mouth to warn the driver that Seifer was about to blow out their fucking tires when a bullet popped off of the roof and briefly burned his cheek. He cursed, ducking into the car, crouched ridiculously in the frame of what was once the windshield.

Seifer hadn’t done what anyone with a brain would have done and shot the tires. He had single-mindedly continued to shoot at Squall.

And he did, Squall bitterly returning fire from the top of it, until they were too far off for a bullet to catch them.

Holy Hyne, he thought, as he felt how fucking wet his own skin was, flowing with the blood dripping from it. He looked like a butchered cow.

He finally got a look into the interior of the car; his thigh was resting on broken glass maybe a foot away from the driver’s face. It was the terrified techie, her grip white on the metal wheel, her frozen face tear-stained. But there was hardly a scratch on her whole person, and she was driving like a train off the tracks out of there. Besides her in the passenger seat was the General herself, holding tightly bunched fabric in the grip of one hand over a red wound on the other, the wrapping having been torn off of her face to reveal the black hole where an eye had been long ago. The remaining eye had fixed him with a look that confused him for a second before he remembered what responsibilities were.

“…You wanted to apprehend him,” he said, with numb placidity. He looked back over the dunes, but they were so far away, tearing at absurd speed, that he could hardly see. “Sorry.”

“Stop the car,” said the general.

The techie stopped the car way to fast, and Squall was finally pitched off of the windshield. He dodged the wheels expertly (it helped that he rolled over almost the entire vehicle) and compared to hos his skin as a whole was starting to feel, rolling in the sand for a bit was almost comfortable.

He heard one of the doors snap open. “GET IN THE CAR,” the general shouted.

Squall got to his feet without too much incident, unless you count sudden, searing pain as incident. He loped over to the car, popped open the back door, and settled into the space that was suddenly made for him.

Not only was everyone he ran into that mess with in the car, there was an additional person now. “Who’s this?” he asked, making the new guy shrink away.

“Messenger,” Beatrix said. “He was sent to let me know the coordinates of the emergency base we’ve set up so that we could rendezvous there. He happened to catch us not long after the violence started.”

“Huh,” said Squall, suitably impressed. “Glad there’s enough people to make a base.”

“Leonhart?”

“General?” he asked, doing his best to sound properly attentive despite how dizzy he was starting to feel.

“You know who that man is?”

“Yes.”

Beatrix leaned her head back on the car seat with visible relief. “Thank you for fulfilling your first mission in a timely manner,” she said, like she was reciting another woman’s words. “We will report at the base and consider your next assignment in due time.”

Huh. On yeah.

‘Your main goal is to determine who this Commander is.' 'Only capture if a golden opportunity presents itself.'

There you have it, then.

—

Original Note:

I know it's a stretch, what I did with Squall's mental state... it was something I wanted to play with... if it seems sudden here, I'm going to be fleshing it out. I tried to use fantasy-ish terminology for the variant kinds of trauma reactions that career soldiers or fighters develop. It gets... raw when they've been through emotional trauma AND had enough headwounds, and reactions to that sort of psychosomaic trauma vary. I am leaning on FFVIII's incredibly weird storytelling tone where weird worldbuilding is just kind of put onto the reader, and you know it's not totally how humans always work in real life, but it's going to be woven in to the story. We're playing fast and loose with the trauma here... I'm working with the fact that I took away his canon reconciliation with his own emotions, and now it's been ten years. That mid-20s chill-out helps a person not be a deranged stresscase, but for the sort of repeated trauma he's been through, it won't fix anything. Things that have never been addressed, you know

That's what's fun about doing a fic in the future of the canon timeline... playing with that ten years of not getting therapy has done to everyone... time heals SOME wounds... anyway time for some real hateful shit that becomes a ship eventually, I promise

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Okay. We've encountered a minor setback here.

It was about an hour after the most heady effects of the opiates they served him had fizzled out that they started questioning him. 

Squall had refused painkillers about five times while the resident surgeon pried at the glass in his legs and prodded at the bullet in his shoulder. That was, until he said “Look. You can pass out from the pain when I start wrenching bits out of you, or you can get knocked out by the drugs first. Either way, you’re going out.” And if Squall could swallow anything, it was a bitter reality. 

He had been rushed in fast, too. Right after they went their winding way to the makeshift camp set up halfway to the mountains. They had worked with the coordinated efficacy of terror that Galbadian soldiers always worked in to set up something serviceable in a spot that looked like nothing on the map. He hadn’t even had time to ask if the army was still in possession of their missile base before he was shoved in a (remarkably sterile) plywood surgeon’s office and slapped on the card table that would serve as his operating bed.

There was a sense of life outside the thin walls. He could hear birdcall. It was an improvement. He wasn’t sure how significantly their numbers had been reduced by last night’s raid, but the scattered, hectic troops running between temporary tents and locked jeeps seemed… sparse. 

The heady, warm tingling in his fingers had finally seeped out and his tongue felt like a mostly normal size (though he was still numb and tired and his brain felt like it was stuffed with wool). General Beatrix was sitting straight-backed in a folding chair with a new eyepatch fixed on her head and a sword strapped to her side as the surgeon futzed with stitching him up, so it was time to report.

“So he is a SeeD,” she began.

“Seifer Almasy,” he said, and swallowed, because his throat was so dry. Opiates. Fucking opiates. Was the painkilling worth feeling like a little doll getting his buttons sewn back on? “Seifer Almasy was a SeeD. Never retired. Missing, presumed dead, about eight years ago. Final leg of the Timber war. When the bombers missed their target and hit the downtown directly, he was one of the operatives reported MIA. Body never recovered. Now…” he reflected on the facts sourly. “Now I have to wonder if he was in on it.”

“Hm,” murmured Beatrix. “There’s been a suspicion for the long time that the off-target bombings were an inside job, but Garden never made a declaration.” She spoke without the suspicious bitterness he had come to expect from Galbadians on the issue.

“We’re still not sure either.” He swallowed again. “No proof. It was exactly when he disappeared. But many casualties were vaporized with the downtown. And he was supposed to be there. Who knows. Who knew.”

“How long was he a SeeD?”

“…About…” he did the mental math again. “A year and a half. Seifer….”

Where do you start?

“Seifer was an early-childhood recruit, like most of the original SeeD,” he said, and saw in the periphery of his vision the drawn frown and pinched forehead that appeared just about any time the practice of early childhood acquisition was brought up outside of the Garden. Yes, we know what you think of it. Argue with the results if you want . “Despite proper training, he had. He was. There was a flaw in his character. Something about. He wasn’t quite SeeD material, though he should have been.

“He failed the test about five times,” said Squall, marveling at the memories that came back to him, now, which had been gathering dust under the floorboard for years. It was like his brain was itching with them suddenly. Slow and anxious rides skimming the waves as he wondered if he would lose his kill-virginity today. A hand in his hair. Fingers curving in. He hadn’t thought about all of this in so long. “…Not public knowledge, he finally passed because he was sick with the flu the last time he took the test. Fever. Shakes. He didn’t have the energy to act out, so he finally just followed orders.” Dickhead. 

“Seems odd they’d let anyone who failed a test five times and only passed under extreme duress pass at all,” Beatrix commented shortly.

“…”

Now, there’s something he didn’t want to think about. “Later on, some… extenuating circumstances were discovered.”

Cid’s desk, after his retirement. They had escorted him out of the building. ‘Coup’ couldn’t be proven in court but wasn’t entirely inaccurate. He hadn’t had time to clean. There were pictures, names, evidence of special interest in a handful of the students. Squall didn’t like to think about it because he had been one of them. Quistis too.

“I see,” said Beatrix, making her own conclusions.

“I think he was only an active SeeD for… a little over a year. Thorny. Aggressive. Not good at taking orders. Went off on his own. Excellent as a bodyguard. He has his uses.” More than he was aware of, evidently. “I remember he was… a few months before his disappearance he did go under investigation because of suspected excessive subordination. Aiding resistance factions against orders.” Him being involved with one faction or another wasn’t really an issue, of course. SeeD didn’t have political loyalties. But directly subverting your orders because of a private agreement was an issue. “Issue was dropped eventually. Guess it shouldn’t have been.”

“If I am to take a stab at putting it all together…” Beatrix said, somewhat dryly, her posture immaculate, like the bandaged hand was just as comfortable laying on her lab as the one beneath it, “The young operative got too involved with a resistance faction, decided it was where his true loyalties lay, used inside influence to help infiltrate and sabotage an official strike operation from inside the Garden, and staged his death in it so he could officially defect.”

“It sounds too involved for him,” Squall marveled, remembering the hot-tempered asshole he once knew. “But maybe.”

“Resistance factions typically have loose chains of command,” Beatrix scoffed. “That’s one thing that distinguishes them, obviously, from organized government. Disorganization. Commander or not, anyone with a loud enough voice can help call the shots. It’s very likely it wasn’t all his idea, and that improvisation was allowed in the implementing of it.”

“Sure,” Squall agreed. And swallowed again. How the hell did some guys languish on opiates forever? He felt like a shitty crash dummy version of himself. “Speaking of, I can confirm for you the identity of Rinoa Heartilly as the sorceress as well. Unless someone identifying herself as Sorceress Rinoa, who looked like the identifying images, and was casting magic could have fooled me.”

Beatrix raised her eyebrows. “When was this confirmed?”

“Last night. I didn’t have time to report it properly. Surely someone is helping Almasy come up with these clever ideas.”

Beatrix hummed her disapproval of the situation in general. “I do think these disappearances line up fairly well. Caraway’s daughter would have been officially reported missing not long before your timeline of events.”

“Wasn’t she a radical since she was a kid?” asked Squall, trying to remember the files he read in he yesterday that felt like years ago.

“Yes, but her location was known until mid-way through the Timber War. At some point she became a known insurgent with an unknown location.”

“Ah.”

“Then the pieces add up for why this particular faction is so resource-rich and deeply-rooted,” Beatrix sighed, like the whole thing was giving her a bit of a headache. “Of course we know that resentments for the Timber campaign factored into this, especially the botched bombing, and it stood to reason that some agitators remained the same from one issue to the next. But it’s a serious issue that they had enough competent personnel working on this operation for so long.”

Granted. Squall wondered if he was going to be pulled out from this one early, once Xu got a really good luck at what was going on. Garden certainly wouldn’t want him to just die in the desert. Hopefully her intel machine had been cranked hard since he reported last.

“Can you tell me more about Almasy?” Beatrix asked. “I have scores of reports about Heartilly, but I’ll need to start his file from scratch, unless we can get Garden intel.”

Hilarious. No one got Garden intel.

So he began to talk, haltingly, when his tight throat allowed, about a person he had to dig up from six feet under in his mind, as if he had his hands on the shovel. Gunblades. Sparring. Biting threats. Lived just down the hall. Poor scores. A mind that went sour as the war did. Trenches. Removal of command. Obstinacy under investigation. Untrustworthy. At his worst when he is quiet. As good at fighting as he was bad at focusing. Twenty-eight. Six foot two. Identifying scars. Like a dog. Principled. Stubborn. Bites in and tears. Won’t unlock his jaw. Not for shit. Lost cause. Lost cause lover. Used to like romances. Maybe a fanciful mind. Idealistic, even. Too principled. Black and white. Can’t take dissent. With him, or against him. Easily aggravated. Overcautious. Short fuse. Couldn’t cope. Unbalanced. Rumors he was going shellshocked. Maybe he never adjusted to reality, after all. Like he woke up at war one day and couldn’t understand how he got there. Hated it. Hated taking orders. Hated fighting. Hated being told there was no choice. Hated his superiors. Hated everyone. Always was that way. Known him his whole life.

And then he wondered, have I? Have I known him my whole life ? Because he couldn’t remember a time before knowing him, exactly.

But that makes sense. He can’t remember his life before Garden, a fact which he’s come to accept. And Seifer was an early childhood acquisition, too. So. Always. One of the faces that had always been there, before he wasn’t and Squall was clinging harder to a smaller and smaller list of people who had always been in these cold and capable and unchanging walls, made of metal, which alone would never change on him. Though Garden drifted from shore to shore, and the familiar faces filtered in and out with the water rushing under her metal halo, she was constant, unrusting, uncompromising, unchanging. Like the only mother he ever knew, cold, hard, metallic, comforting, all-enfolding.

And he wasn’t going anywhere. He would stay right here. At home. No matter who came and went. So don’t worry about him. Don’t dig into it, let him handle his own affairs. He’ll be there. In the Garden. Like a statue. No matter what.

— 

Opiate dreams are absolutely fucking killer, especially if you aren’t aware of when you drifted into one.

He’s being nestled in someone’s soft arms like a well-loved doll. He doesn’t have to wonder who she is or where she’s gone. His head is resting on her thigh, and he knows it's soft, but it occurs to him that he can’t feel it. He feels listless and he knows he has to get up but he just can’t. She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t move.

“—so are you a Goddess?” he asks her. “What are you.”

A goddess?

“Like your poem.” He doesn’t have all of the words now.

Oh, that. Well, take a look.

A hallway opened before him like a flower budding. He gripped onto her cold smooth metal harder; like a glacier, he slipped off. And he fell off of the side of the Garden, right out a window, with broken glass spinning all around him like a firework. He kept sliding like she had a hundred floors. And he kept falling, but it got darker. And he kept falling, but he didn’t find any ground. And it felt like he was slipping into a great shadow, cast behind her, palpable, thick, cold.

“Get up,” said someone, from right behind him, stretched thin a mile on the ground. And still he kept sinking, like past layers and layers and layer of the same skyhigh spine, repeating.

“Get up,” she said, and was as great as the sky as she was sinking under his shadow. “Get up” she said “or be buried” and he tried to just close his eyes. He kept seeing, though. The light passing. Blue, white, silver, cold iron beams. Getting slower, and slower, as though whatever lift he was on was winding down slowly to a final destination.

And for hours he drifted past the spine.

—

For a while it was as if he could see them floating in the dark void of mother’s shadow, other thin shades of the underworld. Pale. Almost identical. Their humanity mostly stripped away.

Time hadn’t started to flow normally yet. It was still frozen, like some cosmic winter. Perfectly structured, crystalline void. Interlacing architectural beams, cathedral eaves. And even so he could half-see it, like an impression on his eyelids; people. Soldiers. Hovering before him, too close; gone again.

I think that’s the field surgeon’s room , he thought to himself, at one point, but I can’t quite get there. He kept falling through the floor, heavier, hotter than the cold world around him. Out of place. A sputtering matchstick. Blackened.

— 

He became aware of them both at once, the surgeon’s room and the depths he had slid into. Like he was still peering up from an inestimable hole, but he knew it was in the sun-baked lands of the makeshift camp asd well. They were walking by and by his bedside because they kept finding more scattered troops to haul in and treat. They were talking about how a lot of the scattered men were finally being found now.

Somehow he had learned from his place in the bottom of the pit that Beatrix had made the choice to self-detonate the missile base. No doubt a heroic choice to keep weapons from falling into enemy hands. There wasn’t a casualty COUNT per se. Many men had had their ears, or eyes, blasted out and went wandering the desert. Most everyone had been using the cars to scour the sands for shell-shocked survivors. How curious it was, then, that he had found the general herself with a skeleton crew ready to raze the enemy on foot the next morning.

Squall was only a little more than halfway certain of what consciousness he was in, coming to hesitant terms with the truth that he appeared to be on a military cot right now when, unfortunately, he was called for. And not by the General.

—

At least five separate people told him to stay back or tried to grab his arm as he lurched like the undead out of hospital row. His feet were somewhat numb, they banged up against things and made metallic clatters. He continued anyway, single-mindedly shoving and bumping people away from him until he was all of a sudden in the sunlight of a desert afternoon, his head swimming with the sudden heat, his eyes as useless as glass.

Was she here?

Was she standing right before him?

There was someone hanging on to his arm; they weren’t easy to shake off. God, he was weak. He hated fucking opiates.

He had to slowly blink his eyes clear and let the bleaching sun into them to see her through the pain. At first she was a dark blur, but slowly she became something like human. A vertical line of darkness that shimmered and coalesced like a mirage. Black hair. A long dress. A little red smile.

“Sorceress Rinoa,” he finally managed to address her. Holy shit, his throat was dry. He almost hacked trying to swallow his tongue.

“Helloooo,” she said, a sort of cheerfulness that felt like aggressive impatience. “Oh, no, he really got you, didn’t he…”

A little spark like a caught firework flashed in his heart. “He didn’t,” he spat, having to pause to sputter and cough a little. “The glass. I kicked a car window. Opiates. The doctor drugged me.”

“Ooohhh…”

“I was upright before then,” he insisted, technically correct. His eyes finally cleared he could see her mostly like a person, a person in a pretty dress, in the shape of a woman, but standing still and strange, like the picturesque representation of one. She could move from pose to pose, but froze too long in them, like a dancing statue. And remembering how she had appeared before him, rising from the sands to strike like a nigh-invisible viper, made his heart start up with bitter fear. He hated it.

“If you can manage, then,” she said, a little tilt of her head that started cute and then froze up like her neck was stuck, “we’d very much appreciate your company at Home. We have some matters to talk over with you.”

“What?” he asked, off-puttingly snappish, as usual. He knew it was but couldn’t change it. (When he stood still too long he felt like his flesh started sagging to the ground on one side again.) He crossed his arms.

She smiled again. “I’d like to walk you back to Home. We can talk more privately there.”

“…Back to the prison?” he struggled to understand how this was happening to him.

“It was a prison, yes,” she agreed, though she stubbornly maintained that “it is my Home now. Myself—and my commander—we both need to speak to you.”

Oh.

Oh.

He needed to speak to him. Seifer thought they had to talk some things over. Set the record straight. Make sure they were both on the same page. So that they knew where they stood. Wanted to make sure Squall knew how things were going to be, in his outfit. Make things all clear to him.

Oh, he needed to fucking SPEAK to him, WELL then, surely that would be just PEACHY, SURE, LET’S cover your eight years of unexplained absence, Seifer. Let’s fucking DEBREIF. Let’s catch the fuck up, let’s make sure Squall knows the fucking shape of things.

It was like he forgot that the actual sorceress was standing right in front of him, tiptoes buried in the stand as it clutched to hold her up. He was distracted by the bile in his throat. Involuntary, unpleasant, predictable.

“…Lead the way,” he said, after perhaps a little too much time standing and staring at her, and heard a quiet echo of Shiva’s voice in his tone, a restraining, bitter cold.

“Of course,” she said, with an ideal smile. Gentle and sweet. Instead of approaching him, she patiently waited for him to approach her, to take the last few steps across the sand that separated him from following her Home. But when he took those steps, he felt that the sand was turning to glass around her feet. Literally, unfortunately. Like she had been pouring radiation around her. The closer he got, the more sharply it crunched around his feet, making delicate spikes. 

“Oh, let me,” she said, and for a lurching second he felt like he was falling backward, even though all that was happening was that she was extending her hand to him. Her fingers were poised carefully in a gesture of beneficence. 

He braced and his shoulders jolted when she tapped him with just a few fingertips, as delicately as a hummingbird tapping a flower bulb. An unknown and intangible sensation seemed to wash over his body, like water sloughing off grime. And then his eyes were clear. He was steady. He was blinking and awake and his ankle was throbbing.

She turned around and began to walk through the sands, bare-footed, he realized, wordlessly indicating that he should follow. And, uncomfortably beginning his pacing (in clothes he suddenly realized were grimy, bloody, and sweat-stained, limbs that hurt and a strangely still, clear head, like a cold wind had blown all through him), he realized she had just… negated the drugs in his system. Like some kind of… ultra Dispel.

Well, that was fucked up.

—

The walk should have taken hours. Not two, more like five or six. Through doing nothing he could see she made it pass in minutes, like they were just sliding from the top of an hourglass to the bottom, and the sand parted way for them. The sun noticeably shifted, turning its brilliant gaze. And because the walk only took a fraction of the time it should have, he was literally almost to the prison when he realized (first) that she had known where to find him and (second) that he wasn’t even armed.

It was like realizing he had forgotten clothes entirely. He was unarmed ? When the fuck had he even last left his rooms unarmed ? He’s had to argue with grocery clerks about keeping a weapon of war on him before. WHEN had he last been just unarmed . Backwards never , that was when. No wonder he felt like a fucking ghost wandering. He was about twenty pounds too light.

Shiva ? He asked nervously, and shifted through their names. Diablos, Carbuncle?

They were there, humming through his body like a generator.

So it was with a more high-strung mood than he could remember having in the recent past that he approached the armed fortress where his long-lost rival was hiding unarmed and in the escort of an unearthly demon-woman. She did something odd as they approached the invisible barrier that had given Squall hesitation last time; she seemed to settle, put her feet firmly on the ground, and as she stretched her hands out to touch the spell, it was with a caution he hadn’t seen on her before. She closed both her eyes, tilted her head back, then leapt through the forcefield as if leaping though a waterfall. 

On the other side she was suddenly so solid, landing on an ankle with a twist and spinning, laughing, going about in circles, leaving footprints wherever her giddy steps landed, even though she had left none outside. Her hair turned like a spinning hawk; she stumbled a little when she landed unevenly. 

The transformation from one minute to the next was so complete that Squall hesitated to go through himself, but he wasn’t going to look unwilling to do anything the sorceress did with ease. It still felt like a heavy weight to him, a scouring downpour that stripped his magic and dulled his senses. Whatever it did to her, it sure wasn’t meant to do to him. 

Others who were standing at guard (a MUCH better guard than the last one he had seen, so, he had at least managed to scare these people) approached with earnestness when they saw Rinoa prancing inside of the barrier. Their faces were smiling. Until they saw him; then they all bristled, with the sort of brittle fierceness he recognized as grief.  He had been the murderer of their comrades mere hours ago. Voices rose; Rinoa stumbled a little awkwardly to the nearest man, gripping both his shoulders.

“Come on, sshhh!” she giggled, a saccharine, unfamiliar voice. “I got him for Seifer, alright?”

“Rin—”

“I know what happened, okay?” she said, an almost perfect empathy clogging up her voice. “I know how you feel, but we could really get this moving if we get an agreement out of him.”

Squall chose to not say anything yet. He was trying to take stock of his guide, the complete change in her speech, demeanor, expression, her fucking adherence to gravity. It felt like it was going to become important to understand what the hell was happening fast.

“So,” said Rinoa, turning with her poor balance to face Squall, having to push her dark hair out of her face, “It’s nice to meet you! I’m Rinoa.” She held out her hand for him to shake.

Like fuck he was going to. He nodded and that’s what she was getting. “…SeeD Leonhart. Which you knew.”

“I like to reintroduce myself as myself,” she said, bubbly. “…In here, the sorceress cannot stand in front of me.”

Stand in front… “Meaning…”

“Meaning sometimes the Sorceress is running things, and sometimes Rinoa is,” she said, a little impatiently, putting one hand on her side and lifting the other up to Squall’s face, not a poised gesture, but a simple pointing finger. “And inside the barrier, she can’t run things.”

“…Meaning that previously, I’ve been talking to Sorceress Rinoa,” he said, feeling uncomfortably like he was playing along with a child’s game, something he was very bad at, “and currently, you’re… Rinoa Heartilly.”

“Almasy.”

It felt like his chest dropped through the floor. “Wh—at—”

“Rinoa Almasy,” she corrected, more haughtily this time, a stubborn scowling that he swore he recognized growing on her face.

“—” There was. There was no was he. There was no way he—

—wouldn’t. There was no way he wouldn’t .

“Mrs.,” he said, the whole thing rolling off his tongue like puke, “ Almasy .”

—

She told him a lot of things as she drug him into the building, up an escalator, down an elevator, all around from hall to hall, absolutely not getting where they were going in any sort of linear path. Absolutely none of it was useful knowledge, and it leaked out of his brain like water as soon as she finished saying it. Men and beasts alike absolutely fucking glowered at him whenever he passed one by. The lower levels of the place, all of which he crossed at least briefly, were warm, chattery, crowded, scented like meat and cloves and coriander. Too warm, too many, and too much, like a crowded bath.

He was trying to set straight in his head why he was here, to put a point on it. The trouble was that it was all vey double-sided. He hadn’t been thinking, exactly, when he agreed to follow the sorceress. He had agreed, he figured now, either because he had hammered it into his head that his job now was to secure and interrogate the commander or the sorceress, or because an older, less disciplined part of him, drawn up to the surface with bad dreams, had wanted to see Seifer. Technically, on their surface, these two goals looked like they could serve each other. He could tell himself that he could accomplish both, if he suddenly developed a taste for deluding himself. In actuality, a person's desire could very much foul up a neat, tidy inquisition.

(Personal desire had ruined so many potentially amazing SeeDs. He wasn’t stupid enough to think a person could just ignore what the wet, goopy physicality of their body said it wanted, the weepy parts, the twisty parts. But he was not really used to them moving him like this anymore.)

They had to walk through a room that smelled sharply like metal and ozone, made of freshly scrubbed chrome, before they got to the commander’s ‘office.’ And it wasn’t an ‘office’ like Squall had an office, papers and hidden mold and such. It felt more like a studio. Not like how an art studio is a studio. Like how a martial arts studio is a studio. The floor was mostly empty, the burnished metal taped in boxes and circles, neat, measured rings of so many feet. There was, in fact, a bullet-riddled line of targets. No desks. No couches or armchairs, just a couple repurposed waiting chairs flanked with end tables, a cabinet of drinks, swords heat-welded to the wall, a stack of boxes, and a man with a gun.

He had it cocked and ready, faced to a target on the wall to the left. Behind him was a curved wall of glass, looking over the desert in an almost 180° panorama. The glass was dirt-smeared from having been periodically drug above and below ground, so even though it was still fiercely bright outside, in here, it was dusky and cool.

He set the bullet soaring. It cracked into a hardwood board, which buckled, hissed, and stuck the bullet in itself. The flare of niter and smoke lit up his face for a second, hawk-eyed, stuck to the mark.

Rinoa, like someone who wanted to die, snapped his concentration by clapping and complimenting him on the shot as she walked in the door. Squall found himself just barely inside the doorway, holding the automatic doors wide, not able to step further in, not quite stupid enough to turn around.

Seifer tensed and his eyes snapped to his wife (disgusting. abhorrent) with a sniper’s glare before they cleared up. He turned his body toward her, lowering his gunblade one-armed in an honestly insulting display of physical prowess. But when his eyes caught the man in the doorway they didn’t move again, not even when Rinoa put her hands on his shoulders, not even when she leaned up to give him a kiss on the cheek, not even when he turned his face to return it.

Squall could see it. It was faint, now, a subtle line of white, a place where his skin hadn’t quite forgotten. Cut between his eyes. Just like his own. He noticed last time. He noticed now. It pulled his eyes. The man he—

When Rinoa pulled back and saw Seifer’s fixed expression, she patted him on the face (more solid, less soft than it had once been) and he finally flicked his eyes over to her with a little sound. She raised an eyebrow. “…So, it’s him?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice held down low, leaning down to scoop his free arm around her waist, “it’s him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Rin,” he said, a slightly exasperated admonishment. The unspoken message was ‘I would fucking know if it was him.’ He shrugged to indicate she should back off, and she did, though not far.

What was weird, that is, utterly fucking weird is how the easy familiarity they had with each other made loneliness churn in his stomach. For a second he felt like if he reached out his hand he was sure to find Quistis right beside him, with an exasperated little smile, to walk through this with him. There was something familiar, something…

He tightened his grip on nothing and stepped into the room far enough that the door would sigh shut behind him. Rinoa let Seifer stand in front of her as he shifted his weight to face Squall dead-on.

Squall had, in fact, fucked him up. He figured most of the bruising was currently hidden under the short-sleeved shirt that clung to his torso. But there was a fair sight of damage to his collarbone, chin, and cheekbone, where Squall must have landed some solid hits he didn’t actually remember. It meant that while one side of his face was sun-tanned, sharp, uncomfortably old, the other was bruised, purpled, a little puffed up. It made him feel. Unqualified.

Shit, he asked himself, are you containing and interrogating, or are you talking? Now is the time to decide.

If you’re asking me, advised Shiva, whose thoughts curled in like ice on the windowpane, you’re listening, it appears.

“—the miserable bastard himself,” Seifer said, a little bit of distaste curling up one side of his face. The other was a little too swollen to respond properly. “…Have you gone completely mute sometime in the last five years, or what?”

Stars above, if he wasn’t tempted to just not say anything. But, he reflected, Seifer hadn’t actually heard a single word from him so far, so it was a legitimate question. “Eight.”

“Huh?” he asked, as quietly, purposefully threatening as ever.

“Eight years,” he stubbornly corrected. “No, I’ve not gone mute in the last eight years.”

“—Oh, so I didn’t have the exact NUMBER right,” he sighed, a weirdly, scorchingly comfortable vitriol. “Fuck, forgive me for not having the exact number right. I meant about five years, man, which a person familiar with normal conversations would’ve known.”

Maybe he said that to emphasize how long you had been literally fucking MIA, Seifer, you fucking purposefully obtuse meathead. “So, now would be the time,” Squall said, having to use the tips of his teeth to bite back the extra venom in his words, because he was pretty majorly disadvantaged if he got Seifer to pop off, “to let me know about any long-term secret missions or deals with Galbadia Garden you’ve got going on, or some other way to explain where you’ve been fort his long.”

“So, let me ask you ,” Seifer countered, shifting his weight as Squall got a little further into the room, “how far up the ladder you’ve climbed now? Some kind of… weapons specialist, I think? General status? Make it clear for me, I don’t remember all the bullshit ranks and titles Garden’s stuffed up with.”

Was he… was he trying to show off the fact he had intel on Squall when Squall didn’t have any on him? That sounded intelligent for this asshole. Couldn’t be. “SeeD A-Rank Operative, in-house GF Master, top clearance,” he rattled off, feeling like the skin was crawling on his back. “Not that I think that means anything to you.”

“You’re damn right,” Seifer said, probably subconsciously hitching up a shoulder to shield Rinoa behind him. It pleased Squall to see he was a subconscious threat. “It’s words to me. And it doesn’t mean shit to any sensible man that judges another man by his actions, not the bullshit titles he’s tagged on to his bastard name.”

“Don’t bother with that, you’re a bastard as much as I am.”

“I was talking about your rank attitude, not whatever gutless Galbadian grunt spawned you,” Seifer snapped back, an assumption he may as well apply to the both of them. “Still waiting to hear some excuse for why you’ve been marinating in war crimes central for the last decade now, happily contributing.”

“Still waiting to hear where YOU went,” he insisted, stubbornly, getting as close to Seifer’s face as he dared.

(What the hell was this feeling, this surreal comfort? Like finding himself back in a black misery he knew would come back, eventually. A bitter, disappointing nostalgia, nostalgia because he was suddenly hungry for it, suddenly hungry to let it all play out, just like it used to. To let the stupid fucking scene play out to its denoument again, hungry for something to be the same, hurtful or not.) His heart shifted when he got to watch that face twist to control itself from mere feet away.

“Nah,” Seifer huffed, not perfectly nonchalant as he brushed him off, “I think you’ve got a little more to answer for. You’ve got a lot of notches in your blade now, don’t you?”

“Come on,” snapped Squall. “You think I’ll play ‘who’s the worst’ with you? Like I’m the only one between the two of us who’s done dirty work? Please.”

“Oh, sure, you’re above that, I figured,” Seifer continued, with incredible distaste. He leaned in front of Rinoa a little bit, to put himself closer to Squall and Squall further from her. “What’s a few more civs on your record? You gotta forgive the guy,” he said, over his shoulder, to Rinoa, “He’s always been a little slow. Pretty sure actually considering the moral ramifications of pushing a bloody fascist regime is a little beyond him.”

The moral unimpeachability of the rebel butcher. He’d only seen that about five times before. They assume he’s fighting for no reason, and they have a good cause, so his murders count, and theirs don’t. Old news.  “Must be disappointing,” Squall growled at him, and hoped that it was disappointing. He hoped it turned him red.

“Disappointing, not surprising,” Seifer told him, and had the utter fucking guts to use his height to loom over him. What a gigantic bag of dicks. “You were always such a fucking bootlicker.”

“So you’re married to the sorceress,” said Squall, instant, icy, kind of surprising himself.

“Hah,” said Seifer, half surprise, half laughter, his hands folded over his chest. “Hah! Yeah, I married her. ‘Cause she’s the woman I love. And she’s the sorceress too, is that a problem? Rin, did you just hear this man accuse me of climbing your lap to the top?”

“Of what? Seifer!” she said, with a pink dust on her cheeks. She playfully smacked him on the cheek that wasn’t bruised; he twitched with a smile. “I can’t believe you right now! Sit down, let this man have a chair, and hold on while I get you both a drink.”

Disproving absolutely nothing, he obeyed, sort of play-shoving Rinoa away and turning on his heel. He casually, infuriatingly turned his back to Squall, like he wasn’t concerned in the least about doing so. He slammed Hyperion against a stand that clicked when it took it in, then used one hand to angrily indicate a chair to Squall. “Sit,” he barked.

Naturally, Squall considered passing. But it occurred to him that if he didn’t cool down, he was absolutely going to learn jack shit during this ‘meeting.’ He slick-heel turned into the chair to take it up, and sat straight on his spine to observe the people he was stuck in this fucking sharktank with.

‘Rin’ was drifting like a jellyfish, light on her feet, mixing something with bottles she juggled effortlessly in and out of a glass-walled case. Frankly, he couldn’t believe that any kind of antimagic shield could just nullify the raw power he had seen the sorceress exhibit in the past twenty-four hours. He would be fucked if he let his guard down around her, even though she clearly wanted it down. Because she clearly wanted it down. And even ignoring the fact that Seifer had gone toe-to-toe with him yesterday, even ignoring the fact that they may be equally matched on a field that didn’t involve magic, he was definitely at a disadvantage right now. A huge one. Just about the whole deck was stacked against him. If he left today, it would almost certainly be with their permission. His options for actually fighting out with Seifer in custody were…. Few. Separation and secondary locations would be his best goals, and those weren’t in his sights right in this second.

Simmer. Slow down, he told himself, feeling with conscious discomfort how hard his heart was hammering, without his request, how much it insisted to his limbs that he wanted to move, wanted to be doing something. How much he felt like he was vibrating with him in the room. Slow. Cold. Quiet. Slip under the ice.

She was handing him a drink, and he decided to hold it. He would have to be held down and have it poured down his throat to drink it, but he’d hold it.

Seifer got an identical drink, seated much more roughly in a chair some five feet from him. He had one leg perched on the other, ankle on his knee, and his chest leaned back, observing him from over his nose, like he—like he always did. Had. The jitter of his foot, the ticks in his face; it was the same man. Just this fact felt so significant, that it was the same man. With some years on him, weighing harder on some joints than others it looked like, but him despite it all.

Because he had thought Seifer was dead for years. He had. He had helped bury him, in the tomb of the lost soldier. He had laid him to fucking rest with Quistis, barely older than a girl back then, silent as stone at his shoulder.

His stomach was twisting. No matter how he said cool, simmer, calm, quiet. No matter how, his stomach was twisting and his heart was hammering him awake.

“Now,” said Rinoa, basically flouncing onto a chair of her own, which she had set close to her husband’s. He looked at her with only the slightest tilt of his head and a tick in his mouth. “How were we going to start this?” She prodded him.

He exhaled, rolling his eyes to the other side, like he had heard this too many times. “Right,” he groaned, and snapped his blue eyes back to Squall. “Look, Garden has to cut its loses with Galbadia.”

Oh, fancy that , he thought. You’re right, and let’s be done with swords and guns and armor and all that other nasty business too. In fact, let’s become a flying bakery instead . “Do we,” he asked.

“Let me put it in words you get,” he said (in a massive fucking prseumption), gesturing with the hand that had a mixed drink in it, forgetting it was there, and spilling some on the floor. “Shit,” he said, and then pretended it didn’t happen. “Deling’s been on his last functioning brain cell for years. Which you would have to be willfully stupid to not notice. As far as successors, he’s been gleefully kneecapping anyone competent enough to take up after him for years because he’s too paranoid of losing the power he has now and he can’t see past the sheer size of his ego. The whole state can go one of a few ways when Deling finally croaks it, which, not to alarm you or anything, is going to be soon.”

The man has three assassination attempts with this breakfast in the morning, knew that, Squall thought sourly, but kept quiet for the time being. 

“Either one, it fractures immediately into several smaller states fighting for autonomy,” Seifer continued, “or two, someone with enough gumption tries to take over Deling’s role, and finds themselves trying to wrangle together a nation trying to fracture into bunch of smaller states fighting for autonomy. And since Deling has left no one of any value in line after him to take over? Surprise, that person will be an ineffective crony who throws money at Garden to solve his problem for him. They can depend on Garden, after all. You’ve never failed them. They throw money, you slug bullets. You’ll be gunning civilians in the street until either the fascists run out of money, the cities run out of people, or y’all run out of public goodwill and can’t show your faces on the street again.

“Here’s the thing about autocracy, Squall,” he said, as if painstakingly explaining to a child, “they don’t reach an end goal and stop the violence. Violence is the goal. Violence is how they keep the autocracy crushing faces and cleaning streets. Violence is how they keep desperate young men devoted and their girls terrified into compliance. And they won’t shake your hands and say ‘job well done’ when peace is established. Peace will never be established. They will find an enemy, and a new enemy, and a new enemy they forgot they left in the back of the fridge just to keep the violence rolling.

“You keep taking Galbadia’s money, that’s the only way it ends for Garden. You either become so integrated with the regime you see your independence ripped out from under you—because who else will take your business then?—or you cut it off before that point.”

Wow. Like he had never heard a pitch like that before. Though it was surprisingly… not eloquent …. No, not harsh ….

Heart-felt . Surprisingly heart-felt , for what he had expected from Seifer. Surprisingly sincere. It really sunk into him, listening to the words scattered like rapid fire, that Seifer might have split from Garden because he was an honest, actual idealist. That this wasn’t a grift. This wasn’t what Seifer told himself to sleep at night. This is what he believed.

…But he had, in fact, heard it before. “…I get that you don’t want to fight Garden and Galbadia,” he said, “But Garden is neutral. We take the work where it pays well. The only thing we are, no matter what, is…” he said, wondering if Seifer would actually say it.

“Fuck you.”

“…anti-sorceress,” he finished for him. “The primary purpose of Garden is to be an efficient anti-sorceress weapon.”

“And you’re willing to become the tool of a military despot to do that? We’ve both seen how that goes, Squall. It makes pigs out of men.”

“Okay,” said Squall, looking around for a table to put his drink on. There wasn’t really one near him, so he leaned over and set it on another chair. Whatever. “If you’re trying to talk strategy or make a deal, please. I don’t do ad-hominem when conducting business.”

“Yes you do, you fucking flaming hypocrite, you called me a liar with your first breath and an idiot with your second, don’t fucking PLAY at being above it all, you two-faced mercenary stooge,” he said, kind of reaching a stride in the middle of his sentence. “If you’re just neutral to and above a battle for independence against tyranny, you know what that makes you?”

“Neutral,” said Squall, because that’s literally what he just said. Seifer expressively hated that response, and even the sorceress frowned at him, as if after five minutes of listening to him backtalk her husband, she expected better of him. “Okay, let me be clear; state your case. I would like to know what you actually want, here.”

“So serious,” Seifer sneered, an insult that stung him only because it was so fucking familiar. It was like finding an old journal under the bed. It hit him. “Alright, Mr. Neutrality, we’d like for you to get out of here. In fact, consider it a warning. Go find something to do in Centra, suddenly find out that you all have to fly to Esthar, I don’t care why, get out. You’re not going to believe me, but this is it for Deling. His days are numbered. You are convinced nothing can break the iron grip they’ve got on the continent, but you’re about to be wrong. Your Garden’s going to find itself richer, healthier, and happier if it gets off of the continent now.”

“…Buy us out, if you want us to break it off with Deling,” Squall scoffed at him, a little offended despite himself. They didn’t break contracts for nothing. “You’re right about one thing: we have other shit to do. If you want to free me from my contract, the price is 200K, you send it to Headmistress Xu at—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Seifer said, throwing his head back for a second. “Fuck OFF, I literally did contract negotiations, I know it’s not that easy. You can’t do a single thing without making it about money?”

“…No,” said Squall, who has slowly cultivated a taste for telling off choosing beggars in his years in this position. “I’m at work, Seifer.”

He expected more snark immediately, but actually, Seifer’s face fell. The sneer was smoothed over. “Y’know,” he said, still rough, less venomous, “I did almost forget. You’re at work. You’re not your own man right now, you answer to the boss. Not your fault this is my life. Not your fault this is life and death to me.”

He said it all with a strange lack of bitterness. “It’s… it’s still life and death to me,” Squall said, awkwardly, slightly offended. “I have almost died several times in the last 24 hours.”

“You’re a professional,” muttered Seifer, and Squall had no idea if it was supposed to be sarcastic or not. “Look,” he said, and he never looked less like the man Squall remembered splitting from reality at an alarming rate as the shells flew overhead than now, as he leaned forward with a tired, determined look on his face, “I can’t make this nonpersonal, Squall. Not that I was particularly skilled in being a professional in the first place. I’m not ignorant to that. People are trying— We’re trying to overthrow an autocratic despot. I cannot fucking talk to you on the level of cash, contracts, and operatives right now. Or not just on that level. I don’t even know how you can have the mental removal from what this is like for every poor bastard who lives under a whim-driven Tyrant’s thumb with absolutely no power of their own and I don’t care to know. I’m trying to talk to you as a fucking person, to let you know to get on the right side, which you have to fucking know is the right side, or get out.”

“…No, you weren’t,” said Squall, actively focusing on the wrong thing, though he wished he wasn’t. “You weren’t talking to me as a person. You were talking to me as the Garden rep. You told me to get Garden out of here.”

“…Alright, then talk to me as a person now,” said Seifer, leaning not forward, but farther back, crossing his arms over his chest. Not an appeal, a challenge. “Hi, Squall Leonhart. It’s me. Seifer. I’m not dead. I defected from Garden and have been moving and shaking in the resistance underground since. This is Rin, she’s my wife. She grows on you.”

“Hey,” she said, with an actual pouty face.

“So how the fuck’ve you been? How’s life ?”

He spat out all of that in a vicious facsimile of civil conversation. He had, as his tone made clear, absolutely no expectation of Squall being able to respond with civility in turn. He expected Squall to cut him off bitingly again, and yet he was looking at him, waiting for the response anyway, his eyes a kind of unapproachable, angry mist that...

And now Squall found the right/wrong time to remind himself that he never decided if this was a mission or a conversation. That he never settled on his goal for this train wreck of an afternoon, and it was unfolding like it. Like a man who wasn’t sure if he was turning left or right was at the helm, and tearing wounds into the ground as he went.

Was he gathering intel, or was he talking to Seifer? Was it personal or wasn’t it?

In that moment, that meant, did he tell Seifer how he was, did he give away an ounce of himself? (Did he fucking have the guts?) Or did he put his foot down and tell him he was asking the questions?

“…I’ve been spending the last eight years of my life keeping my only home from literally crashing and burning,” he said, with bitter bluntness. “And if you’re interested in getting me out of your hair, remember that that’s what I care about.”

Seifer leaned back in his chair even farther as Squall talked, as if trying to pull away from his words; Squall kept talking. “Further, if you really want me out of your hair, the best way is to tell me what you’ve got up your sleeve, and how you want the next few years to go,” he murmured, leaning on phrasing he had heard from much, much better diplomats than himself. “Yeah, the last thing I want is to get Garden stuck in a zero-sum game again. Obviously, that’s what I don’t want. Whether Deling goes down in a blaze or you do is the same to me; I just prefer it happens soon.

“I’ve you’ve actually got a surefire way to cook Deling, and I’ll be the judge of that, of course I don’t want to fight a losing battle. I still cost 200K, and I still answer to—”

“You,” said Seifer, and grabbed the back of his chair in a grip that turned his knuckles white. Rinoa immediately cringed, lifting one hand, obviously pointlessly. “Fucking whore,” he ground out, and stood. One foot stomped down in front of the other.

Squall was kind of ashamed to admit it, but he was shocked, and it showed on his face. He wasn’t sure anyone had called him a whore before. A LOT of things, but he had missed that one. It didn’t feel good, actually hearing it.

“Oh, a hot 200 grand makes you an expensive whore,” Seifer continued snarling, and smacked the chair away from behind him so hard it slid away on the floor, “but the price doesn’t change the fucking act.”

Oh, if he wanted to run that by Squall again, that would be great. He didn’t jump to his own feet yet; he wasn’t going to be goaded by name calling. He did tighten his grip on his own arms. “I don’t have so much experience with prostitutes,” he whispered, declining to use the same term. “You might have to tell me what I did to resemble one.”

Seifer made a noise like a dog snarling, really low in his throat, turned his back, and paced behind the chair he had pushed to literally stand behind it as a barrier between him and Squall. And when he gripped it, he gripped it like he was wringing a neck. “I called you a whore because you’re willing to sell your loyalty to the highest bidder, you fucking whore, and damn the consequences, fuck if people die, and who care if the man who got his hands on you is a good guy or a filthy fucking pig, because you don’t care, apparently! 200K is 200K, and if Timber gets bombed, if there’s a death toll of ten thousand, it’s all the same to you! See, but Squall,” he said, leaning forward so that he could stare Squall dead in the eyes, “a whore, typically, she’s got to do what she does. She doesn’t have a choice anymore. She fucks or she’s out on the street. Hell, maybe she’s out on the street already, and she just needs to eat. But you don’t even have to. And you don’t even like it, neither. It’s just business to you. It’s not life and death to you, asshole. Maybe your life, but not the life of everyone else who’s just trying to live their damn life over here!” he shouted, reaching a pitch that made his wife wince back. “But you don’t even care! You don’t have to do it, you don’t just like it, you really don’t care who fucking puts their agenda in you and tells you to ride.”

“— —” Squall really did think of about ten things to say as Seifer went off, but nothing quite came out. He sat with his teeth clenched. His fists clenched. That stupid heart throbbing and gasping. Trying and failing and trying and failing to remember why he was here.

To her credit, the sorceress was standing up to shush up her husband. She seemed adept at taking him back to reality. Unfortunately, she didn’t quite get to him before Squall did.

Not that Squall got to him physically. He didn’t have to. He clamped down one palm on the arm of his chair to stand up, absolutely silent. And Seifer’s eyes were glittering on him, his throat suddenly stuck for breath. Realizing he was shaking, Squall slowly curled his fingers off of the arm of the chair, picked them up, and curled them back into a fist, one by one. Through the whole process Seifer kept his eyes fast to him, shining with anticipation.

He felt dizzy with anger as his eyes filled up with the man standing across from him. Dizzy with blood. Struck in a way that not just fucking anyone could do to him. And that was the whole problem. The same rant out of Deling himself would have made him roll his eyes. Blustering. Self-absorbed. Short-sighted. Completely void of the actual politics, logistics, practicality to the situation; all of that burned on the altar of the ‘moral choice.’ Idiotic fucking optics. What did he care?

And just beginning to realize how angry he was, how much of a problem that was, Squall still hadn’t said anything yet until Seifer, in his lowest, meanest voice, asked him, “’s matter, Princess, nothing to say for yourself?”

Squall made a noise that even he would describe as cat-like as he lunged for him. His goal was to take a fist to his throat and shut him the hell up. Obviously, Seifer had been more than prepared for the strike. He laughed, he fucking laughed when Squall took the two pounding steps he had to take to close the distance between the two of them. It lit up his eyes like something exploded in them. He showed his teeth and laughed, he smacked Squall’s fist like it had been thrown for him to catch it. Then, still smiling, still laughing, he slammed an elbow into Squall’s gut.

Full transparency, he almost puked. There was too fucking much going on in his system already and he didn’t need his stomach jostled again. He took the momentum of almost hurling up hot stomach acid to dive, duck low, and fucking slam the hell out of Seifer’s shin with his heel, then stomp that foot down on his insole because, yeah, he knew that hurt like a fucker. And Seifer shouted (bursting in his ear) and seized when he felt the delicate bones of his foot maybe hold, maybe shatter under the force. Seifer’s hand seized up to grab at the back of his head; Squall got ready to come back up with the elbow and hopefully snap his jaw off its hinge. 

His girl had shouted something; Squall hadn’t paid attention until her hands were on his arm. Unfortunately, Squall reacted by wheeling around with a punch that clocked her hard on the jaw and knocked her down. This would be considered a ‘tactical error,’ if he were employing tactics right now. As is, the contents of his brain were pounding blood and scorching adrenaline, and that’s all. He was literally about to lunge on the woman when Seifer, probably shocked that Squall would stoop to that, grabbed his arm, wheeled him around, and half locked him into a hold. It might have worked, too, if Squall hadn’t instinctively dropped his weight, leaned forward, and flipped that heavy motherfucker over his back like a mustang that wasn’t going to be bridled today. He had no idea how much Seifer actually weighed, but it all hit the ground like with a boom like a roof collapsing. He shouted, and it cut off like he had been switched off when he hit the ground.

He raised his heel, aimed it, and slammed it into Seifer’s neck.

Then he was the recipient of one well-aimed and thoroughly intended slap to the face, open palm, right on the cheek. It didn’t stop him because it was an incredible hit (it wasn’t), it stopped him because he was fucking shocked. In five seconds, he had forgotten the sorceress was there. Maybe there was something to her claim of the powerful antimagic field, because her presence was enormously reduced in this fucking place. Either way, there was no way someone trained like him should have just forgotten she was there.

Sobering smack or not, Squall’s better sense wasn’t there to be called on. He reacted by striking out to seize her wrist. Snarling. He didn’t quite get it, it slipped through his grasp—

And then his vision sparked.

Literally. He saw little lights.

And then he felt some exquisite fucking pain. Like a sword had riven him from inside.

He collapsed, half on top of Seifer, who hadn’t quite gotten up yet. And now he could feel the gasps under him, his lungs working like bellows, the damage he had done. Could feel the wet snarl of his voice, through his skin. How warm he was. How his body was going limp over him, melting like punched bread dough. And he was finally realizing he had been tased, because he knew what it felt like, when he saw her slipping out from behind a cabinet, the same cabinet Rinoa had pulled drinks out of. Long, tightly bound silver hair. A neat uniform. Well-done eyeliner. A cool gaze.

Fuujin. He. He almost didn’t recognize her.

A sorceress, an enemy commander, and they still kept hidden back-up in the room. He should probably be proud of that. Something very bad was happening to his body. Numbly, he recognized it. His brain felt like it was slipping but his body felt tense. There was a word for all of this.

Seifer said something and it just… just washed over his head. Like he was being held under water. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were closed or not. Some hands were gripping on to him, either side of his shoulders, his biceps, sliding down; all his skin felt like he had just come out of anesthetic. He thought he was being undressed, maybe; there was a warm hand on his chest. Something about it, it felt terrible; he opened his mouth to gasp, and squirm, when the heat flushed on to him. Like that one hand was just so much, too much, grasping all the skin of his chest. He thought about saying something, telling him to get off, but the impulse seemed to just fizzle out in his nerves. He just didn’t have any more control of his body.

He could kind of see. Fuujin. Her long legs, walking across the floor. The sorceress kneeled, flipped her long dark hair over her shoulder, peered at him, but he couldn’t get her face. Her voice tumbled and flittered over everything like a little bird. And the hand that oppressed him, loomed over his chest, slid on his skin—his skin, bare—they pulled his body all around, drug him up like he was being lifted out of the water, wrapped in a circle around his chest.

But he couldn’t really see it. And he couldn’t really feel it. The impression of what he thought was happening was heavy on his mind like a flame bearing down on the balking candlewax. The hurt boring down a hole. What it aws burning away, who knew? Being held all over, touched all over, too hot. He hadn’t fucking asked for this. He hadn’t asked for your help. And he’ll fucking hurt you again when he can. Make no mistake. He’ll take those fingers in between his teeth and snap them. Fuck you for being gone. And fuck you for coming back. And put your hands in his hair again and he’ll.

He couldn’t move anymore. 

—

Original Note:

Man I keep beating this guy up (for a reason, a reason called the plot)

Okay FWIW I'm trying to do my due diligence here by giving both of the dudes fair points whenever they start arguing (this will happen a lot). And I think they do both have reasonable and sensible arguments (as well as understandable emotional arguments) but I think it's also more obvious than it should be that I agree with Seifer. He's straight up correct. Fascism is always wrong and giving it any concessions at all is a moral fault. Sadly, we do it every day to not die, but sometimes necessary things are also wrong. It's a hard world. End sentence tbh. Anyway he's not correct about everything, I'm trying to nuance but I accidentally picked a side

We’re going somewhere with the dynamic between them too. No worries. Our narrator hasn't discussed some stuff yet. The time will come

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We'll, uh, we'll get right back to you.

He was half-in and half-out for a while. Way too long.

—

Seizure. That was the fucking word.

Wait, that couldn’t have happened. Not to him.

His throat felt so fucking dry, like he was wheezing through sand. He hates opiates.

…No. No, wait. That wasn’t quite right.

Squall stared at an unknown surface until the light properly filtered into his eyes. And as his eyes roamed across six almost identical unknown surfaces, he came to the conclusion, unfortunately, uncertainly, that he was in prison now.

Real prison. A jail cell. Bars. Locks. Metal furniture.

He then had to realize he wasn’t just in prison, he was tied up in prison. Metal cufflinks. Chains. His wrists were cinched behind his back, though not so tightly they had gone numb An extra bracer was locked around his chest, to make it harder for him to just snap the chains. The most concerning detail, in his opinion, was the clothes. He was wearing clean (albeit sweaty) clothes.

Someone had changed him. Warm. Wide. Hands. He couldn’t.

Shiva, please , he thought, trying to swallow.

She called him something kind and endearing, not a word, a sensation, a vision, a premonition of being held in an icy, protective embrace. To his own horror and shame, he teared up. He didn’t cry, but the moisture had to pool in the lids of his eyes, since he couldn’t move his hands.

What happened , he asked her, though she rarely understood where his physical body was or what it was doing.

You are very much weakened , she explained to him, conveying it in images of frogs and mice and fish frozen in ice, heartbeats very slow, clutched by death until spring would set them free. Your body was hurt, very badly, first by the sorceress, then by the commander. And again, by strange power. The strain was nearly too much for you. Your heart complained about it.

…Stopped? He asked . Did I…

I don’t really know, she admitted, seeming to gust around him like a little wind. Insensibly, strangely exploring his body. I know you were locked away from sensation. It seems the connection between body and spirit was severed from some time.

Seizure, episode, fucking heart attack, he didn’t know for sure. He knew it sure fucking wasn’t good... And he knew that this time, he could give himself a little grace for having been captured. Not that he had been captured often. But, every other time, he had been pretty pissed at himself. This time, he felt like he had his excuses in order.

Why doesn’t it hurt now? He wondered.

Shiva said, in so many implications, that she was the wrong person to ask. Squall was left to feel the very real concern that he might have fried a few of his nerves. Or shorted out his system so bad that it couldn’t feel the enormity of the pain.

He had read in an anatomy textbook that the process of digestion is massively painful. The human brain lights up in pain while doing the work of digestion, or so says modern science. But it has gotten so used to that pain that it no longer turns it into complaints. So much goes on just under cognition. He wondered how much.

…He had really lost it, there.

He was pretty sure he had attacked the woman.

Technically, she… No, not even technically. She was a combatant. She was a sorceress. She had put her life on the line.

But that…

That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he hadn’t meant to.

Both times, he hadn’t meant to attack Seifer. He can’t remember making the choice. He didn’t think he did.

What was he? What was he? Some kind of animal?

—

His thoughts remained black for quite some time. He couldn’t tell if he was being held above or below ground, though he convinced himself one way or another several times. Being in the desert, the air was cold, dry, and unchanging.

Seifer’s people treated him like a human. Food, sanitation, privacy. A lot of privacy. For what he thought might resemble a day, day and a half, he mostly saw an impressively energetic and aggressive nurse tech who had defected from Galbadia’s nurse corps. He figured the reason she had defected from the army hospital was because she couldn’t be nice to bastards. She didn’t spare many sweet words about his abysmal physical condition and, after how absolutely intolerable his body felt after so many hours of not really being able to sleep or eat because his cognition fizzled and reset every five fucking seconds, he decided he agreed with her.

He had felt fucked up before. This was really fucked up. It was like he was being force rebooted, constantly. Like someone was clicking the key into his ignition and revving him, non-stop, but the engine wouldn’t turn.

Even if he wasn’t being rearranged into slightly different forms of metal bondage depending on his current physical needs, he would be considering laying low for a night or two anyway. He wasn’t even looking forward to standing up like this. Every muscle he moved hated him.

And it did occur to him, at point point in the recurring process of becoming mortified about how hard it was to sleep, that this may well be for the best. He may well get the information he needed out of the rebels better this way than any other. The nurse tech was free with her snappish explanations of how things worked around here, the few other people he saw, faces bobbing at the door, tended to speak loudly outside. 

He started putting some pieces together. He had nothing else to do.

This operation had, in fact, been going on for years. Some of the people now attending him, including the nurse tech, had started infiltrating this and other facilities in the area years ago. The takeover had been largely bloodless; they leveraged the frustration of the grunt soldier and underpaid worker to oust the high-ranker officers almost effortlessly. 

Yes, Seifer had been a big name in resistance factions for quite some time now. As a pusher, it sounded like. Mostly of arms, ammunition, and wheels. Theft. Black market. Dirty deals. Outright banditry. But being the guy who brought the guns ingratiated you to some pretty battle-hardened rebels, anyway, and the in he had with the sorceress had sure helped his climb up the ladder.

Squall was hearing that this wasn’t the only base they had taken over. It was the only base they had finished taking over, publicly. What was left of the missile base was abandoned to them as well. Their system sounded—well—as disorganized as Beatrix had assumed it might be. Shouted arguments showed that not only were there more than a few people calling shots, but that anyone labeled subordinate didn’t necessarily feel subordinate. 

The only person who had unquestionable and unshakable authority was the sorceress herself. Whether she was declawed in her gated prison or not, her power outside of it was awe-inspiring. She had, according to the reports he was getting, been the most important factor in banding together the motley crew he had seen, drawn from all kinds of gangs, rebel groups, and dissenting political clubs, into the loose confederacy he saw today. Bandit kings, street kids, and upper class dissidents, under one banner. And she really, REALLY had a chip on her shoulder about Deling.

Naturally, the rebels painted a rosy picture of themselves and how sure they were of their victory. If they were right about how many military operations they had infiltrated, they had a reason to be congratulating themselves. Even so, Squall was noticing a distinct lack of something in the people he had seen, spoken to, and observed, which they were going to be feeling soon. Namely, a military.

They had fighting men, they had a commander; they did not have an organized military. The general chaos and militia-like atmosphere of going in guns blazing had worked for them so far. They were riding the element of surprise and springing well-laid traps, but they would run out of those. And Deling was not going to run out of military men.

Anyway, prison was as fantastic a place to gather intel as ever. And it was a better experience so far than the Accidental Deep Sea Research Center Lock-in. He wasn’t planning around to see if the quality of his stay really decreased after three months like it haid in the Accidental Deep Sea Research Center Lock-In either.

He was still waiting for anyone in charge to show face when the door was quietly slid open one day.He wasn’t immediately sure who it was. The nurse forcefully hip-checked it in; most of the others who had attended to him in one way or another were pretty emphatic about their entrances. The first thing he heard after this barely audible push of the door was dully tapped heels.

He opened his eyes and, to his surprise, saw the woman he understood as Fuujin. He  ‘understood’ her as Fuujin because wasn’t 100% sure he had understood right. She had honestly changed a lot; her appearance was slick, composed, and stable. Without the adolescent fringe of hair on her face or an unkempt uniform, she had clearly grown into an adult confidence that he hadn’t been privy to. Her cool demeanor hadn’t changed; it was collected as well now.

Now that he was forced to, he was struggling to remember when she, in particular, had vanished. It just hadn’t been a surprise that she stopped showing up at some point after Seifer’s ‘death.’

She stood waiting for acknowledgement he was awake and cognizant. Eventually, he nodded. She nodded in return, tapping closer to him. When she reached him, she knelt down fluidly and silently, until she was eye to eye with him.

Which reminded him that she was supposed to be missing an eye. It looked like she had a falsie, now that he had a good look at her. 

She gave him a quick glance-down, an assessing one, not a gloating one. She nodded, perhaps indicating that he was basically in the condition she expected. Looking like he had been goddamn fried.

Then, in an action that startled him, she smacked one of her hands down right in front of him, practically between his legs, to slam something metallic onto the ground. It was some kind of can. He wasn’t sure what yet, he was more interested in the chutzpah she had to get within striking range, even if he was tied back.

And she didn’t give a rat’s ass about that either, apparently. Though she left him pinned to the wall, she reached behind him with a key she flicked out of her palm to set his hands free.

“Sorry,” she said, in her succinct voice. And that was all. She stood up, leaving his hands free, to exit the room and lock the door behind her.

He looked, first at the shutting door—he hadn’t even had time to say a thing—and then at the object she had left behind her.

…It was a can of beer. Cold.

 …So, was no one ever going to inform him that Fuujin was a fucking gem, or was he supposed to find out with her slamming down a beer for him as an apology for tasing him?

—

He was almost finished with the can—and he had taken his time, unable to resist a single creature comfort in the run of days he had been having—when the door was opened again.

This time it was opened with a solid grip, pulled out pretty suddenly. Squall was just on the very edge of actually feeling good for a second, with most of a pint in him and no one to bother him (and his legs had gone numb in a way he could ignore) so he guesses that would be the exact time he would see Seifer Almasy again.

Squall knew it was him largely because he blocked out almost all of the light behind him, towering almost above the doorframe. He was huge. He had gotten that huge as a late teen, way ahead of the rest of the pack, and obviously used it to be a petty tyrant at the time. Not that Squall would have known it himself at the time, but depending on one’s size is a foolproof sign that someone is concerned they don’t have anything inside of it.

It wasn’t true now. What he was storing up in that six-foot-plus frame he didn’t know for sure, other than egoism and righteous fury. But he could tell that there was something actually sustaining him now, more than a story he believed in. There would be no other way for him to take up that space so casually, block out almost all of the light behind him, and lean on the doorframe like he fit in it perfectly. It took a second for Squall’s eyes to adjust well enough to see anything but his shape, top-heavy, kind of cocked to one side as he observed the prison cell. Very plain clothes. Boots. Dusty travel wear. Couple of scars ripping up his skin for interest.

…Huh. He had never realized that Seifer looked a little plain under the bluster. Cropped hair. Kind of a flat face. Strong but typical frame. No frills. And it all settled better on an older man.

“You really became a worse person with time,” said Seifer, to break the silence. His voice, however, had apparently settled at twenty-ish when he last saw him. There was the slightest, faintest backwater accent, now, slipped in from the company he kept.

“Same to you,” said Squall, automatically, though for what it was worth, he meant it. Last he saw this guy, in retrospect, he was having the sort of ‘why am I killing people’ breakdown that usually led to turning into your resignation papers and getting a house in a small town, like Zell had. Apparently, Seifer had settled instead on the absolute solution to the gross, awkward feelings about having done murder—which was deciding he just felt bad because he had been killing the wrong people.

Squall thought he saw just a shade of a sneer on Seifer’s face at that. He might have been imagining it. “I’ve actually been thinking about it, past few days.”

…Days? Fuck.

“You surprised me at first,” he said, tapping the heel of one boot against the doorframe. He had reached his maximum potential standing still time, apparently. “’Cuz from what I did remember of your bad traits, I didn’t remember you being rabid. Didn’t think of you as the kind to just go in for the kill like that. Not in a man’s house, in front of his wife.”

“You live in a prison, and your wife is a witch.”

“Okay,” said Seifer, looking askance, as if appealing to an imaginary audience that agreed with him. “Circumstances aside, I think I can see now how you degenerated from Garden-variety jerk to bootlicker.”

“I actually don’t want to hear your theory about it, thanks,” said Squall, deciding to toast him with the can before he downed his last swallow of beer. Shame.

“…Where—is that beer? The fuck did you get that?”

“Fuujin.” Kind of surprised he didn’t know.

Seifer looked over his shoulder, offended, as if he expected to see her hoovering back there. She wasn’t, as far as he could tell. “Damn,” he said. “Can’t take my eyes off that woman.”

“What, can’t control her?” he asked.

“Fuu does everything I say,” he informed Squall, turning back around to point a finger at him. “If she thinks it’s a good idea. If I’m being an asshole, she does whatever she wants.”

“That’s the same as doing whatever she wants all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s the joke,” he said, understandably unamused. “I can run a revolution or I can make sure everyone’s behaving, man, not both.”

“Seems. Disorganized.”

“You’re telling me. I literally run this place and I don’t run this place.” Squall found it inconceivable, but Seifer was incredibly casual about that admission,  like it didn’t matter that his men were in continual, self-sustaining chaos.

“Might want to do something about that, or an idiot with four guys, no vehicle, and a gun might pull off a flawless net maneuver under your base and get right back out,” he said, evenly, kind of wondering why he couldn’t act cautious when bound up in a guy’s prison.

Seifer did pause to glare at him. “Gutsy, by the way,” he said. “Damn certain that was General Beatrix that you threw in as bait like that. You’re just… cool if she dies, or?”

“You were fine with letting the whole place be guarded by untrained civs,” Squall told him bluntly. “There was barely a person here who was ready to defend.”

“Nice deflection,” said Seifer. “You’re just fine if she dies?”

“She’s a General,” Squall protested. “Putting a General in the line of fire is expecting her to do her job. Putting the music festival partygoers you have in this place in the line of fire is being negligent, at best.”

“Fucking sorry that people want to be outside,” he said, throwing up the hand that wasn’t bracing him on the door. With every movement, he split the backlight, which roamed on his face. “Alright, you got me on one thing. I really thought we wouldn’t be facing a raid that fast. Thought we had y’all on the defensive. You can go to bed reassured that that mistake isn’t happening again.”

“Ah,” said Squall flatly, looking over his shoulder, “bed.”

“It’s prison, Princess,” he said, with an audible scoff. “I would keep you out of trouble in a guest room upstairs if I thought I could trust you to stay out of trouble.”

“…What, you want me to stay here?” he asked incredulously.

“…Yes?” Seifer said, like that should have been obvious. “Can’t report if you can’t get out. Can’t fucking… headshot a recovering addict, bust my face, and jack a car if you can’t get out of the room. Duh, I want you to stay right here, where we can see you.”

“What happened to getting my Garden off the continent?”

“You said no, firmly, several times! Just so that everyone who accused me of not being able to take ‘no’ for an answer can hear, I took ‘no’ for an answer here!” he said, again, fake-shouting behind him. Hell, maybe there were people watching the whole thing. Then he turned back to say, “It was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere with you. Hell, Rin chewed me out for trying to get the job done myself. Just because my dumb ass thought a shared history might matter or something, can you imagine?”

The bitterness surprised Squall, who sat back on his hips a little, accompanied by gently clanking chains. “I’m sorry?” he asked, incredulously. “You shot me, Almasy. First thing you did when you saw I was down here, you shot me in the shoulder.”

“You were actively, like, RIGHT at the moment, taking shots at—I don’t have to apologize for trying to cap the guy who was killing my men!”

“So don’t whine at me for taking shots myself,” Squall snapped, “now that we’ve both established that we know what war is.”

“You little—”

“And don’t pretend you’ve been treating me like an old friend. This whole fun episode has been you telling me you’re treating me like an old pal, but the actual words out of your mouth are threats or insults,” he informed him.

“Like you’re so easy to talk to?”

Petty. Petty as shit. God, this was worse than trying to shove off a disgruntled customer. “You’re not very convincing when you play-act as a professional, Almasy,” he told him, aware he was biting through his words a little too hard. “Considering the amount of whining and theatrics you spit out when things don’t go your way.”

“GODDAMN,” said Seifer, in a pretty sudden fit of pique, and turned around in the doorway, grabbing the handle to slam it shut and coop the two of them in together. He yanked it so hard it bounced on its hinges and then shuddered into place.

In the brief darkness of his eyes adjusting to the twilight of his cell again, Squall could hear, but not see, Seifer say “Nah. Nah, I’m especially fucking terrible at talking to you. Goddamn,” he swore, again, and Squall was gaining just enough vision to see him crouch down, stupidly close to Squall, practically in his short range. And Seifer knew he had his hands free. “I can’t fucking talk to you.”

“—” Squall was dumbfounded for a second. What—what was he….

“Don’t know why I thought we would be older, more mature, able to put the past behind us, fucking come to a consensus on how to not let Galbadia go up in flames. I don’t know why I told myself you’d be the perfect man to talk to. A stroke of good luck.”

“— — —” He was trying, really, honestly, he was trying to figure out what to say to that crock of bull. Was Seifer so emotionally unstable at their age that this mood swinging was genuine, or did he think he was interrogating? “—opposite—” Literally, how the fuck did a person explain this? “We’re on opposite side of an ongoing terrorist—”

“Goddamn, okay, I know,” Seifer cut him off impatiently, and now Squall could just barely see him, as he scrubbed one side of his face with a hand and lifted it away, letting one blue eye sparkle in the shade. “I’m aware of the situation. Squall, you know every other man in Galbadia is willing to play turncoat, or at least informant, if he thinks it’ll get him an extra buck to scrape by with?”

…Yeah. Corruption was rampant. Yet another perk of being assigned to Galbadian officers. Intel was easy. “You’re comparing me to that? I’m not Galbadian.”

“You look like one,” Seifer shrugged, which is literally (let’s give him a hand) the first time in his life that Squall realized Seifer kind of…. Didn’t. His pallid complexion, the blond hair, it was kind of rare. “But you mean you’re not one of Deling’s dogs. You’re from Garden. You’re different. Garden kids don’t sell each other out like that.”

“…No. We don’t.”

“So as I figure,” Seifer continued, crouching even fucking closer, to the point where Squall was starting to feel like he had to concoct a plan to pound in his nose just because he probably could, “since Garden is loyal to itself alone, since everyone and everyone else KNOWS Deling isn’t long for the world and his autocracy isn’t either, since SeeDs have an admirable history of having common fucking sense, it stands to reason to me we could get y’all to wake up and see you’re on the losing side. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you. If you could let Xu know that it might be beneficial to her to not let the whole continent fracture into warring city-states when the power vacuum backfires, that would be great. But no,”

“But no ,” Squall interrupted,  “you wanted me to break a contract without informing the client and without pay. And then,”

“Fucking TITS Squall if you need the money so bad I can find you fucking money!”

“I don’t need money, I need to fucking follow the protocols of my job! You want me to just set the precedent that SeeD breaks contracts on a whim,”

“I’d like you to set the precedent for jumping off a burning ship, if you wanna live! Why—goddamn!” He interrupted himself again, and smacked the ground with one hand to stand up, pace a step away from the man bound on the floor. “Why can’t I talk to you??” He turned around again, facing Squall, standing over him. But there was no menace, none at all. No sense of intimidation. (And that was eerie, like he didn’t know who this was.) “The fucking whole universe couldn’t send literally anyone else? Not a single other SeeD in a full Garden of them?”

“Guess not,” Squall said, stubbornly. “You have me.”

“I got you here, barely,” Seifer conceded, “so far as your body goes. Fuck me if I think you’re listening to a word I say.”

“Why would I,” Squall ground out. “You want a man to listen, commander , you don’t lock him in a cell.”

“And if you want a civil conversation, whatever the fuck your title is, you don’t try to murder someone and his wife several times! You know what?” he snapped, thumping a fist on the door again. “ Fuck you. Actually? Fuck you. And also, I give up the talking thing, don’t worry about it.”

And with that, he had the door wrenched open, his ass out of it, and slammed back shut again.

—

The sound of the door slamming smacked flat in the dark, dull room.

He heard a few seconds of echoing silence, drifting down to the floor like dust. And something clicked in his head, as he ground that weird ass exit through the gears in his head, trying to discern what the fuck kind of strategy that was supposed to me. It finally sunk into him.

“…Holy shit,” Squall said, to himself. “He was fucking sincere the whole time.”

He was sincere the whole ass time, every stupid word of that. No subterfuge, no games, no interrogation tactics. He had completely lost what little diplomacy Garden had pounded into him, and was, at all times, presenting himself as no more and no less than himself. That was Seifer Almasy, trying to talk to him.

…What the fuck does he do with that information?

              

—

The opportunity presented itself about two days later and, frankly, he was shocked.

It wasn’t sloppiness on the part of his enemies, or cleverness on his own. It was pure bad luck.

The long and short of it was this: they had a power outage. Nasty, too; they blew a generator, if not two. He startled awake from the first good doze he had found himself in weeks when he heard the bang. He quickly realized what had happened by the darkness outside his cell.

He had almost settled right back into that doze when he said to himself, son of a bitch, aren’t these cuffs electronic?

To keep changing up how he was tied up so that he could take care of bodily functions when necessary, they used a high-tech system that allowed for links and connectors to be manually unstuck and then fuse back into place when the power was on. It was all electromagnetic, as far as he could tell. And the answer, he realized, when he tried to stumble up onto aching legs, was that the whole system was partly electric, partly old-school. He unstuck himself from the wall. He unstuck his wrists from his back. They were all still bound up in heavy metal rings, but…

Oh, fuck. He had to go now.

The problem which he had already anticipated quickly presented itself when he slammed himself painfully on legs that could barely feel into an empty, dark hallway. Yes, everyone was distracted by the busted generator, and he had time to get out of this hall. But that would be about as far as he could go. No matter if he went up, down, around, left, or right, he would eventually run into a fuck ton more people than just him and, though he spoke to them, he still didn’t dare try to summon any of his guardians. Diablos, actually, had forbidden him to try while in the ‘witch’s lair’. 

So he wasn’t sure how he thought he was going to just massacre a fortress full of combatants to get out of it. He was good, not superhuman.

Unfortunately, opportunity knocks when it wants to, not when you ask. So he focused on the next step; getting himself to a better place than an open hallway. Getting his best panorama of a floor he didn’t actually remember seeing when being drug down here, he figured that going up or down a level would just lead to more of the same, and not be likely to help him out. He spared half-second glances at shut doors, a control panel, a window that showed only dirt, and then, he realized the whole fucking level opened up into a gigantic bore-hole which comprised the entire inner section of the tower. It was hollow.

He walked over to the overhang, looked down into the dropping darkness, which ended floors below in an uncertain metallic mess, he considered his options. Then, considering that considering his options was losing him time, he grasped the edge, steadied himself, and vaulted over.

              

—

About five location changes, a lot of quick dashing, and the securing of one screwdriver later (grab whatever you can get) he collapsed with a hand over his mouth in something that looked… kind of… kind of like an ant tunnel.

What he had learned was that the entire prison system was a terrifying mass of moving, mechanical hydraulics, some massive enough to lift and turn the whole building, some designed to turn individual prison cells on their axes and take them to different levels, some tiny and designed to let the individual levels bounce and withstand pressure when the building was rising or sinking. It was like being inside a giant telescope or spinning gyroscope; just about anything could move, if you were at the control panels. And just about everything needed space to move, tunnels that elevators, cubbies, and whole rooms could slide along.

Transport in them was simple—walk. Climb. Duck around the corners. Try to hide in the walls past the walls, just beyond earshot of the people living in the regular rooms. It was like a rich man’s house in Deling; there was one house, small, and then the house of his maids and butlers and mistress that clutched the man’s house. Rabbit warrens of extra rooms, kitchens, dumbwaiters, and halls for the lower class to move unseen.

The trouble was, he knew, with a bit of dread settling in his stomach, was that there was no one trying to crash in them, maybe as a convenient place for a clandestine affair, for a reason. The reason he knew that is he saw an elevator whoosh by him in a nearby shaft about two seconds after he ducked into his first hall, and if he had been standing in that shaft, even had one hand inside of it, it would have been neatly, instantly severed.

Standing in the hydraulic tubes was asking to be crushed at any moment.

So, it was time to get these damn bands off of him, now, and work on getting out of the building proper. He didn’t love his chances if he stayed in the walls for too long.

—

Long story short, he was practically face-down in a maintenance tunnel three hours later, dripping with sweat, free of his bonds, equipped with a screwdriver and a rusted pair of scissors that had fallen in a corner, and dead exhausted from having managed to get to that state. Power had long been turned back on in the Prison; they would have long found out he ‘escaped’ from his cell, but not the building, by now. Even so, he hadn’t actually been spotted, yet, he didn’t think. He was unencumbered, untracked, and practically home free.

So, if he had been asked then, he never would have guessed that he would have stayed in the D District Prison’s maintenance halls, vents, and hydraulic chutes for four more fucking days.

It was just much easier to slip in than slip out. Through hours of careful traverse (which constantly involved dodging freakily fast metallic whirring and shifting as the building’s processes whisked by him) he found no less than a dozen ways out of the body’s chrome skeleton, but none of them were convenient. The closest thing there was to a real way out was a straight drop from the bottom of the building to the ground, which was never very low to the ground and never unoccupied. He would be dropping into a viper’s nest that he had purposefully assured was armed and ready. The dozen or so smaller doors, hatches, and vents that could lead to open space inside the building were even stupider exit points, because he would have to fight his way through a section of the building to end up in the exact same situation on the ground. He got out at all last time because he had another person starting a car and three more drawing fire—and that had been a surprise attack.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be relying on surprise this time. He had been spotted, for sure, twice in the period of time he had spent in the walls. Both times an insurgent spotted him, through a vent, down a long hall in the ceiling, they went slack-jawed with shock like they just saw a loose gorilla. He booked it out of there, wove himself into the dangerous safety of the clicking, whirring walls of the mechanical prison again, but the damage was done; everyone knew he was in here, somewhere. It was a comfort to know they couldn’t get to him, but not much of one, seeing as the reason they couldn’t get to him was because the functioning of the prison building was so massively dangerous that he narrowly avoided being several clean in half five times a day right now as elevator cars, rooms, and pressurized air shot right the fuck past him at terrifying speed.

Their best bet for catching him (and their worst bet) would be to cut off all of the power again. He doubted they would do that; he wouldn’t be the only one fucked if their entire base went offline. They also refused to disable whatever was keeping their sorceress in a state of humanity, likely for the same reason.

He came to figure after a while that his best chance for actually getting out would probably be force and hostage-taking. Rather than finding a time with as few possible witnesses to make his escape alone, he would have to find a time when there were few enough people for him to bully into getting him to the goddamn cars and driving him out of here to pull off a quick, clean escape. But the problem with THAT was that he almost certainly needed a weapon. Something threatening enough to boss around several antagonists with guns of their own.

And then Squall came up with a bad idea. A very bad idea. Squall came up with a very, very bad idea, and he couldn’t get it out of his head, and he didn’t have anyone here checking his very bad ideas.

You see, Squall had also found his way into the regular vents, the air vents, and had enabled his spying on very many of the private rooms in the prison, most of which were repurposed prison cells or office space themselves. And that included the walk-in fridge; slightly less importantly, it included the Almasys’ room. Which was typically locked, occupied pretty often, and slept in at night.

Since it contained the Almasys, then it contained Hyperion.

Hyperion was looking lovely these days. Maybe he was just feeling the loss of Punishment, but he was really thinking that Hyperion was a finer weapon than he remembered. Seifer hadn’t changed the ammunition capacity, but the speed with which it could be reloaded now was fucking incredible. The magazine and stock were both kept sleek and light-weight; the blade was actually really thin and quick too, now that he looked at it. Seifer wasn’t going out of his way to make a heavy, overcompensating bludgeon with the thing. It was, as he had already felt, fast, punchy, vindictive. Accurate, too, he would bet; not only did he deadshot moving targets with it, from what he could see of the sight from above, the thing was calibrated to a hair.

Seifer had gone into moving contraband, hadn’t he? And specifically weapons. He must have spent fucking years modding that thing.

It was mostly because of his stupid but unignorable fixation on obtaining the forbidden gunblade that Squall spent a collective 48 hours watching Seifer’s bedroom. Seifer didn’t leave Hyperion behind if he left the room. Not unless he was going to be right back. Obviously, he took a shower, went to pick up something he forgot, or took smoke breaks like any other person. But, generally, like a sensible man, if he was going somewhere to stay there, he brought his weapon with him. So, if some air duct-dwelling creep (it was more like a crawlspace between floors, honestly) was determined to pinch it, they would have to target some pretty limited gaps of opportunity.

So, letting himself believe that getting the best weapon in the outfit would give him the best shot at escaping, and since it didn’t matter if it took him a day or two or three anyway, Squall more or less camped out where Seifer slept and waited for him to be vulnerable.

The couple were actually pretty busy. Running an army fills up your schedule. There were plenty of times the room was empty; Seifer showed up more often than his wife, actually. What Rinoa spent all her time doing, exactly, Squall didn’t have an idea of and didn’t particularly want to find out. Shame that he should probably be finding out, for war reasons, but he had enough on his plate.

As such, he was staring into the empty room for most of the day, tensed to any noise, sinking a hell of a lot of time into a long shot, and thinking. A lot. 

Like any sensible person, he planned out exactly what he would do to stay sane if he had to wait out a night of domestic intimacy. While he was pretty skilled at blaming awkward moments on others, even he had to admit it was kind of his own fault if he had to watch a married couple fucking when hiding in the crawlspace over their room. So he had devised for himself a basic survival plan of how he was going to scooch backwards as slowly and quietly as possible to avoid just such an event, until the hour he thought it had come.

Seifer had fallen asleep hours ago. Squall had been watching him. Not… for anything, in particular. He had kind of expected the restless sleep of the guilty. Nightmares. And Seifer didn’t sleep well, but it wasn’t… like that. It seemed more like the restless sleep of the chronic insomniac. He would slip between awake and asleep in the grey night. He would get up, trying to settle back down. Sometimes he just got up and left. 

No nightmares. Nothing particularly telling or obscene. Tired, tiring, chronic sleep disturbance.

On the first night, the sorceress, who slept like a hibernating bear, wasn’t bothered. She just mumbled at him to settle down from time to time, and the suggestion seemed to hold some sway over him. But on this second night, Seifer had gone to bed alone. Late, in the first place. He had slouched in, actually bandaging something up. Squall wondered what the story was there, but Seifer didn’t do a special amount of talking to no one. He wrapped it up, fucked it up, swore a few times, wrapped it up again. Some carousel circling around his bedroom later, eating a little (but only shit food), drinking a little, bringing something halfway to where it was mean to be and maybe attending to it later, he just flopped into bed, dayclothes, badly-bandaged, still-bleeding arm and all.

Maybe he had torn open a wound Squall had given him. But, no. Probably not. Squall had been in here for something like two weeks now, or longer. He had missed a lot of time, and hadn’t had a chance to give Seifer fresh wounds in a while.

He felt like he couldn’t touch his own thoughts, watching Seifer slowly dwindle into sleep. He felt like it was absurd that he didn’t just know he was here, somehow. He wasn’t far away. He could see that pale scar on his forehead where the furrows of his brow drew tight. He could hear him if he sighed. Maybe Seifer had gotten used to the thought that someone was watching him; maybe he was chalking Squall’s existence just above his head to paranoia. Maybe the pressure of his presence was indistinguishable from something else pushing him down inside.

It didn’t feel right to be watching him, but nothing about Seifer felt right. It didn’t feel right to have not known where he went for eight years. It didn’t feel right that he had gone, it didn’t feel right that he was back. That, in particular, viscerally felt wrong. It felt wrong that they had declared him lost almost a decade ago and he was there, building an underground empire of steel, the entire stupid time. It didn’t feel right that no one had known. It didn’t feel right that everyone had said, would say, they hadn’t seen it coming. ‘But there hadn’t been any signs!’

Squall could remember him bent half forward, drenched, just drenched in blood, none of it his—

Nearly biting his tongue cursing out the headmaster and President Deling, his fist going flat pounding on a shut door, while Squall watched silently—

Remembered realizing that he was sitting by a hollow man, with his drink just sort of slipping into his lips, as they both, they all lost track of the war atrocities they had been commiting today.

It felt wrong that no one had seen that Seifer was obviously cracking. That he wasn’t going to keep his mind through the bombing of Timber. It seemed stupid that nothing was done about it. Like he couldn’t imagine how dumb they were to just take the fists like it was an unavoidable, unchangeable consequence of sending some people to war. And it felt stupid, wrong, and weird that the time bomb in broken flesh he could remember like an especially vivid high terror from some of the worst years of his life was slowly drifting to sleep in a wide bed, with a ceiling fan whisking sweet, cool air onto him, waiting for his wife to return.

He felt like he was right before the jumpscare in a horror movie. When would the monster show up? When would the ugly raging bastard, barely keeping his brain between both ears as the shellshock fucking got to him, spring out of the sleeping man’s skin?

It didn’t and Squall got to be wholly, uncomfortably perplexed with watching Seifer at rest. Looking softened in the silver night light and his breathing going slow and even.

…Squall couldn’t remember when he had stopped trying to ‘get help,’ like he was told to do whenever he complained, back in those days. The late Timber War. The bad days. He remembered feeling free, horribly free, when he realized the help would never help. That the bombfield of his mind was his natural terrain, and all he could do was learn to dodge.

The sleeping bastard under him had kept trying to get help, though. He kept asking to be fucking listened to. He kept swearing something wasn’t right. He kept telling them that they could write him up again, as many times as they wanted, but he wasn’t doing anything he couldn’t in all conscience agree with. Not with so many lives at stake. 

…Hyperion. He had to get Hyperion.

He had begun composing his plan to sneak down there and grab it while Seifer slept. It was an… okay plan. It depended on him being stealthy enough to descend into the room, retrieve a pretty heavy weapon, with moving parts, and bullets, all without waking up a nearby insomniac. And he might have been, or he might have not been. He valued his skills at moving in the shadows, and he wasn’t sure they were quite enough for a job THIS delicate.

But we’ll not bore you with the details of that plan, because it didn’t happen. What did happen was just as he was saying his last sarcastic prayer for his bullet-ridden hide, the door to the bedroom opened up and the witch walked in.

Sashayed? Flounced? Stumbled. She looked eerily graceful for a few steps, and then she bonked into the dresser and went spinning and lurching away. She took it all with a little laugh, that one hand curled up to catch. Dead drunk. She was only wearing a sundress and smile; her shoes and wrap were gone and he could smell heavy smoke on her, and sweat. She pulled her hair back from her face and it fell right back down.

He thought to himself that surely, even drunk, even inside of the forcefield, the sorceress should be able to notice him. Give him an eerily focused look up here in the vents. But she didn’t have eyes for him at all. When the door shut behind her and the hush of the room came seeping back in, she was focused entirely on her husband, who had shuffled and grown tense when the door opened.

She went to his side, with a few bumps in the road, and leaned over the head of the bed so he could see her, one foot popping up a little off the ground. Seifer grumbled something so low and soft that he couldn’t even hear where he was, and Rinoa started laughing before she kissed him.

Which was when Squall realized he might have to employ some of those evasive maneuvers he had half-planned before he had to lay here with his eyes shut through Seifer having sex with his wife, something he did not want in his life. Drunk as can be, she awkwardly rolled onto bed, right over her husband, who grunted about the sudden weight and pushed on her shoulder. She said something sweet, a little cloying, and pushed back at his hands. He used his weight to roll her over; Squall expected to be unfortunate enough to have to watch him climb on top of her, but instead, he rolled onto his side and wrapped a tight arm around her. “Yr drunk, Rin.”

She agreed cheerfully, and hugged the arm that had wrapped around her. She asked him something that Squall caught every other word of, Seifer said ‘dunno,’ with a tired weight to his tone.

Rinoa laughed, and Seifer sort of grumbled at her and… well… he held her close, he guesses. He doesn’t want to say the word ‘snuggled’ because it’s a very uncomfortable word. He just held her. She told him she loved him, very much. He said ‘you too.’

Squall, instead, swallowed the bitter pill of watching two people, very much in love, who he very much had to get dead, settle into each other. Rinoa’s hair tangled into itself on the pillow and Seifer slowly folded into the curves of her back, perfectly content. Squall was unsurprised and disappointed by a heavy, unhappy pang of loneliness in his chest, viscerally missing Quistis, even smelling her for a second, her almost bitter perfume, like plums or ground coriander, the faint scent of soft skin underneath. Being suffused by her warmth in the dark.

Nothing happened. Squall didn’t dare try to get out of here now. He had to wait another night.

—

Original Note:

'Why spend that much time in D District Prison if you're not going to riff on the torture scene,' you ask me (rhetorically); you fool, I say, the prison cell conversation WAS the riff on the torture scene. It's supposed to point out the differences in— 'Lame,' you might (rhetorically) interrupt, 'where's the tortureporn?' I dunno, I left it in my other fic. This one's slower burn. I don't even know if I won't get to tortureporn eventually or what.

This is admittedly a slower chapter; both of the next few (which are in draft form) I'm very fond of so this is setting up some good scenes to come.

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Alright, yeah, sorry about that, we're back on track.

And then the fool took a shower in the morning, so he grabbed that gorgeous hunk of well-tooled lethal steel and ran.

Well, sure, it was still really difficult to grab Hyperion from Seifer’s own bedroom without alerting him but he did it, and he felt proud of himself, and you should feel proud of him too. He even budgeted time for admiring the wonderful machine. It was, as he had suspected, modded all to hell, without being the sort of flashy ego piece he expected. 

It was just incredibly precise, every piece ground down to hairline specificity for accuracy, rapidity, and dependability. He had slips of metal like silk sheets twisted in the workings, screws so tight they were in danger of melding onto the frame, perfectly locked and loaded in place. A machine as meticulously, obsessively detailed and personalized over the years as to become indistinguishable from its owner.

He was not giving it back. He was going to copy the good parts. He was going to give it to his best mechanic and SIT THERE until they gave him a scope as good as this one. But he wasn’t giving it back. What the fuck had he been DOING for the past three years?? Because Punishment deserved all this and better and he had to get out of this room.

Of course, the second he got out and back into the relative safety of the prison hydraulics (which weren’t safe at all) some other unbelievably dumb shit delayed him. Again. It’s almost not worth recounting; the automatic laundry machines in this building set off chain reactions of terrifying pressure changes and hydraulic creaking that made it safer for him to just fucking hide somewhere in the inner intestines of the building than risk getting in the way of a water jet that could just likely bore right through his hand. 

The end result was this, he glumly reflected, as he waited for the building to stop rumbling around him; he wasn’t going to escape before Seifer realized what had happened.

He was going to realize anyway. And Squall was getting out today, no matter what.

He began to weave his way when the coast was (more) clear to the bottom of the building. He didn’t like the prospect of trying to make a ground escape again, but he couldn’t think of a better option. The place, thanks to his own efforts, was better guarded now, and he was going to have to depend (to some degree) on luck and speed to make his escape. The plan was this: wait for a vulnerable person, force their compliance, and use their keys to make his way to another vehicle. While it would be good to actually come back out of here with… anything Beatrix wanted, he was a man alone, and not one who wanted to die today. Technically, he was on the thinnest ice possible for getting captured in the first place. Not with Galbadia (fuck em) but with Garden, who would not smile on that one.

…He could consider himself as bringing back proof positive of the rebel commander’s identity, at least.

He was still looking for his ideal target when a young man who, for some reason, set alarm bells off in his mind turned the corner. This was despite him not recognizing the young man at all.

He had a somewhat oily look, was broad but not too tall, wore a Galbadian defector’s uniform (his old uniform, but patched, pierced, and modded, with his girl’s initials embroidered on its sleeve) and while Squall COULD have met him over his time in the prison, he didn’t know why his presence alarmed him. Maybe he had visited him while he was half-dead and dizzy after the electric shock, and he was subliminally recognizing him. Either way, even though he was alone, Squall didn’t feel comfortable taking him hostage, and he was going to go with his guts here.

Unfortunately, and to a buzzing fear in his skin, the man started slowing as he walked down the hall that Squall was hidden above. He was looking at a little technological device in his hands, something that glimmered and glistened step-by-step. He slowed while he got closer to Squall, and slowed again; it was either one hell of a coincidence, or his instinct was right, and this guy was trouble. He clutched Hyperion’s hilt and felt a thrill in his gut at the thought of firing it.

He saw something clipped on the guy’s side that made him start, and then he heard him say, in a surprisingly accent-less tone, “Alright, you sorry son of a bitch, where are you?”

Squall was torn between how he felt and what he saw. He crouched just in case, pulling up the weapon he knew damn well could punch SOMETHING through the layers of metal if he forced it to. Feeling more nervous than he even liked to feel at his age, he said, “You’d better be who I think you are.” 

He heard the raw growl his voice had turned into; he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep or drunk a lot of water in the past few days. Some, not a lot.

The guy on the ground relaxed his shoulders; he seemed to shimmer for a second, as he looked up to Squall’s voice. “Thank Hyne,” he said, tipping one foot behind the other in a pretty feminine way. “Where are you, Squall? Are you? Are you in the ceiling?”

“Presently,” he said, feeling weak with relief. “I have been for four or five days now.”

“Holy fucking shit, they weren’t kidding,” he said, dropping forward a little in shock. “I’ve had every other foot soldier ask me if I’ve seen the man in the wall since I walked in here. You mad genius. Get down here.”

“You sure that’s the best plan?” Squall asked, willing himself to keep his fingers away from Hyperion’s trigger. “Who are you disguised as? How are you using Gogo in here?”

“You mean despite the forcefield?” Selphie asked. “Yeeaahhhh, it was risky, and I knew it was,” he said, with a sort of uncomfortable honestly Squall didn’t appreciate in this moment. “I eventually decide to put on a disguise before entering and hope that fucking blast bubble didn’t strip it right off of me. I considered just using makeup and stuff, even. And…” he held his hands in front of him, perceptively right into Squall’s line of sight. “It’s really unstable, too. I can’t remember the last time I had so much trouble keeping someone’s body on.”

He was right. The ‘shimmer’ he had noticed was semi-constant. The closer you got to him, the worse it was. He couldn’t see Selphie’s body underneath the disguise, but he could tell that something was off. “That’s… not good.”

“It sure isn’t. I’m glad I found you so quickly, we’ll have to move fast,” he said, drawing Squall’s eye to the little device he had been holding to tuck it into his pocket.

“How’d you find me?” asked Squall with some suspicion.

“Uh, through my many years of experience as your friend who understands you,” said Selphie haughtily, crossing his arms. “And through a real basic magic sensor. You don’t go anywhere without being so full of Ultima they’re just sloshing around in your eyeballs. And I knew you weren’t using them or anything.”

“I used one,” Squall argued. “You didn’t just go right to the sorceress with that thing?”

“I didn’t go up into the suites, so that I wouldn’t run into anyone important, Squall, use your brain,” Selphie countered. “But you saying that makes me uncomfortably concerned there really is a real sorceress in house.”

Squall gave him dead silence.

“Okay,” he said. “Time to go, then.”

“What’s the plan?” Squall asked.

“I hate talking to your disembodied voice, you creep. It really brings out how bad you sound,” he said, consideringly, but switched back to business before Squall could respond. “We’re keeping it simple. This guy has clearance to go in and out.”

“Everyone does here.”

“He’s a contact with some towns in the Southern Island, kind of a connection to fringe separatists, he goes in and out a lot,” he explained, with a  touch of pride at his typical ability to choose good targets. “What we’re gonna do is I’m going to go downstairs all casual, start a car, and start driving and making a nuisance of myself under the prison. To stay in character, and to clear us a path. Then I’m going to use the fun & cool soft fork I’ve gotten into the prison system to open the main hatch once I’m in position for you to drop down. Then you’re going to jump out of here, and do your best to land as close to the car as possible.”

Ugh. Squall hated precision maneuvers. He was alright at them (by SeeD standards) and he could pull it off, but he didn’t like doing it. “You think I can cast an Aero?”

“Once you’ve exposed me as your getaway and we have to get out of there ASAP anyway? You may as well try,” he shrugged. “If I can’t even get a word across to Gogo, I don’t know how paramagic is going to work from you, but I don’t know that you have anything to lose. All you have to do is get to the drop door as soon as you can and wait for me to open it.”

It was kind of a dick move to show off his infiltration skills like that like it was no big deal. Of course, the whole place had been hard-forked by mass infiltrators just this month, so maybe cyber security wasn’t great around here yet. “I’ll do my best. I’m not going to be good against a crowd of people if I’m caught, though.”

“Understood. I’ll make it fast,” he said, though he clearly intended to already. “Squall?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t die,” he said.

“You too,” said Squall, a little less concerned for Selphie than Selphie was about him, as per usual.

True to his word, Selphie turned tail and got back out of there, going just slowly enough to not look like he was booking it. Squall watched him go, and, looking carefully, he saw he had brought his own weapon, clipped to his side, just like he thought. Probably a good idea, in the long run.

Luckily, Squall had this place more or less mapped out mentally. It wouldn’t take him as much time to get to the drop floor as it would for Selphie to get a car under it, but he didn’t want to waste time all the same. He literally rolled up his sleeves (hot in this fucking tin can), did what he had to do to get Hyperion braced, and started climbing up into the vents.

It was something of a rough way down there, since the machinery of the prison got, for lack of a better term, more sparse when you reached the drop. He had to clamber around the lower level in some pretty creaky vents and eventually ended up in a mostly-empty space that was frustratingly hard to hide in. 

That huge room on the lowest level that contained the drop floor that Selphie was going to open was empty of almost anything else; it was a place to carry in armed vehicles of prisoners while the prison was on the ground and hold them while it ground back up out of the ground. In other words, a huge, indoor parking lot, with exits on the ‘walls’, which were locked while the prison was in the air, and a big circular exit on the floor, which would be locked while it was sitting on the ground.  The fact of the matter was since it was so spacious, and since the gigantic machinery that ground open the doors was just too dangerous for a person to hide behind, especially if Selphie was playing fast and loose with security, he had no choice but to hide on the very edge of the room, wait, and plan to go into a running sprint when it started to open up with the goal of aiming his descent (somehow) after he lept.

Terrible fucking plan. This could be the day he died. But just like every other time it was Selphie whose hands were at the helm, despite all odds, and despite his own sense of logic, he felt like it was going to work. Selphie’s sense of timing was impeccable, his luck was inhuman, and his determination was unshakable, always.

So, despite wanting a little more to go off of, despite feeling like he hadn’t planned for this well enough himself, he circled the room slowly, finding the best hiding place that would lend itself to a running leap once the opportunity arose.

He figured Selphie would need a good twenty-five minutes to circle out of the prison, descend, get into a car, and get ready to pick him up. So it just fucking figured that at minute twenty, Seifer Almasy stalked through a set of automatic double doors into the room Squall had to stay in. The good luck had left the building with Squall’s best girl/ best guy.

Squall held his breath and then felt stupid for that automatic response. Seifer looked more uncomfortably, uncannily like the young man he remembered than he had in all the last week. He was wearing something longer, for one thing. He had probably been forced to admit that Squall had torn his battle jacket to shreds. He was done up instead in a long-sleeved and high-collared (but half-unbuttoned) shirt which was barely tucked into his trousers, and on top of that, an overcoat with heavy, lead-lined pockets that he was obviously sweltering in. But, lacking his weapon, he was apparently smart enough to know he had to wear something that could protect him at least a little from bullets.

That said, he looked miserable in it, and that was really what made him look like the man he remembered. There was a statue-set fixedness to his face, to the solid line of his shoulders, the sort of heavy lockdown the body needs to contain the sort of panic that knowing a dangerous infiltrator has nicked your weapon engenders. He was stalking, absolutely stalking; he had been almost bigger than the door when he came in the room and he filled up the breadth of it now. It took him thirty seconds to pace the room in long, unhappy strides; unlike when they were kids, he wasn’t randomly kicking or smacking on things. Just muttering, teeth set, instead of shouting. Signs that he was, perhaps, old enough to know when he was in real trouble.

But he still looked like him, suddenly, in a way Squall hadn’t realized he was missing. That drop of nervousness, uncertainty, the aggression that was choke-holding the fear inside him. He probably considered this attitude to be a habit he had grown out of. He was acting like a child, he probably thought. The thing is that this was the ‘child’ Squall knew. Unhappy and ill fit in himself, sloshing out emotions as he stomped around, like liquor being slung out of the bottle clutched in a swinging hand.

He had looked too stable, not miserable enough for Squall to really recognize him before. It was fucking unbelievable to him that anyone could be happy in the chaos of this lawless hellhole. Helltower. Both, actually.

The problem is that either someone had followed Seifer or someone had been sent to check up on him, because a minute after Seifer came in, a person, two, and three came in behind him to talk to him, and they were starting to slowly congregate. That was bad; the last thing Squall wanted was enough people to delay him when the time came. He had a gun, but he had been depending on heavy GF magic for a long time now. And he wasn’t the only man in the room with a gun by this point, he realized, scanning the small group.

Unfortunately, and on the spur of the moment, Squall decided to take things into his own hands. He braced one foot on the thin sheet of metal separating him from the men below; he might be able to shake it if he got it at the right spot. They would definitely be able to hear him through it. “HEY,” he said.

In an eerie moment, Seifer whipped around first his head, then his shoulders, exactly to where Squall was hiding. It wasn’t too simple to pinpoint exactly where his voice was coming from in this echoing void of a room, which went rattling all its metal pane in their steel frames with every loud vibration. Seifer didn’t seem to be distracted, however, by any of them.

He didn’t say anything yet. He took a step toward the sound of Squall’s voice, opened his mouth, didn’t start. Squall, undecided, braced Hyperion a little better on his shoulder.

“Get them out of here,” he told Seifer, meaning the young ex-soldiers that were now poised between danger and uncertainty, “and we’ll talk.”

He still expected… something he wasn’t getting. Seifer’s face grew tight with anger and he just expected something, and it wasn’t him wheezing out a lungful of air between clenched teeth and silently weighing his options. He turned a half-circle as his thoughts whirled; he looked at the guys flanking him.

“Sure,” he said, indicating his head stubbornly, angrily at where he thought Squall was (and he was right). “Alright, sure. Clear out,” he said to the guys, an order, but not very sharp and authoritative. Enough so, in fact, that they felt free to question him about the decision; then he told them to move it more sharply.

Who is this guy? He found himself asking suddenly, and pushed the thought away. It was the dissonance, he thought, between how he looked right now, the man from the past, and what he was saying.

Either way, in the time it took to feel some discomfort, Seifer’s men reluctantly cleared out. The hydraulic-pressure door hissed shut behind them; the room was almost empty again.

For a weird moment Squall felt like staying there, sitting up in the ceiling, watching, not having to engage. Getting to be still, silent, and nonvolatile. Being somewhat unknown; Seifer thought he had his position, from the scan of his eyes, but he couldn’t be sure.

The moment passed. Squall braced his heel, decided against it, and chose to waste a bullet getting the panel in front of him loose. He hadn’t shot the thing yet, after all. It went in like a dart; clean, next to no shrapnel, even though it was punching through metal and making the screws for five feet around him turn and rattle. Magnificent.

One corner loose, he aimed his heel again to pop the panel right out of the frame. It only took two good stomps before it screeched and buckled and pitched forward onto the floor with a clatter. Seifer spared a look for the broken panel, unamused. But it was a single second’s look before he focused on the danger again; Squall crouched in his hole in the ceiling, the tunnel he had been winding through for days, coiled and tense, aiming Hyperion at him.

It took a second for Seifer to really realize what he was looking at, but it was a good second. His eyes went bright, like windowpanes, and then his cheeks went red.

“I fucking knew it—”

“Yeah, I hope you did,” Squall scoffed, utterly confident that it had been obvious that he had stolen it.

“You piece of shit, why the hell can you not leave the hell enough alone?” Seifer spat, more rage than sense.

“Prison—”

“Yes I know the fuck up that I locked you in you tried to kill me several times!” He carried on, making a fair point. “We’ve been over this!!”

“Sure.”

“Fucking Hyne, Squall, you want to be public enemy number one that bad??”

“I don’t know how to make you understand what a military conflict is at this point in your life,” Squiall told him, a little angry burn growing on the surface of his heart. Kind of like a beam of sunlight, pleasantly hot. “I needed a gun. Because I’m fleeing imprisonment.”

To his credit, this was when Seifer pulled out the pistol he had been carrying in the coat. At least he hadn’t come in convinced he could talk Squall down for the third (or fourth?) time. He felt somewhat complimented.

(And, by the way, it wasn’t a bad gun, a serviceable little pistol, clean and good-sized, but it sure wasn’t Hyperion, big and warm and comfortable in his grip.)

“You don’t fucking need MY gun,” Seifer snapped at him.

“What,” asked Squall, tilting the barrel a little bit to indicate Seifer, “are you trying to trade?”

Seifer seemed caught up for a second, which was more understandable than Squall wanted to admit. (Would he offer to bargain with an enemy officer for Punishment? Well. Maybe.) Reflecting on the fact that another two minutes had passed by, Squall admitted he probably had to take this to the ground.

He had to play it fucking careful, hooking one leg under him and placing the opposite arm down on the edge of the hole he made to indicate that he was about to  jump down. Seifer had been radicalized to a crisp but he hadn’t become stupid; they both knew a moment of transition would be the best time for him to shoot. He didn’t though. He kept his eyes on Squall’s deliberate movements and the gun trained at about his midsection as he lifted out and jumped down to set foot on the ground. Hyperion’s disbalancing weight made it a rougher dismount than he wanted, but no shots were fired. Yet. Seifer’s pistol was flawlessly trained on him as he got himself steady on his feet and acquainted himself with his new bearing of being about twenty feet from Seifer on even footing on the ground.

“Hell are you trying to do with that?” Seifer asked, his voice tightly clipped.

“Taking it and getting out of here,” Squall informed him. He didn’t dare look at any of the doors or hallways; he wasn’t going to let him guess at his escape route. The escape route he was coming up with right now..

“And how the hell do you think you’re getting out of here?” he said, his voice splitting from itself in his frustration. “Use your head, Squall. It’s a PRISON. How you did what you did even getting to this point, I don’t know, but you can’t get OUT of here. This whole place is designed to keep people in.”

“Telling me to come quietly?” asked Squall with some interest. He purposefully lifted up Hyperion to better aim; it was WAY lighter than Punishment. His palms were itching with the desire to pull it apart and learn why.

“No, I know I’m not getting that, you venomous prick,” Seifer growled, “thanks for pounding that into my head.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I want you to know that I didn’t realize it was you at first,” said Seifer, still blisteringly angry, like he was being forced to say this. “I knew you were a SeeD from the dumb shit you were pulling, but I didn’t know it was YOU until I hit you in the shoulder.”

“Sure,” said Squall, not really believing him at first. Then he remembered that among his other faults, Seifer was oddly sincere. He would say had BECOME oddly sincere, but, as he had time to reflect, he realized he always had been. He just had some ridiculous shit knocking around in his head to be oddly sincere about.

He rolled his neck experimentally, testing out how much his body was going to suck for him after spending all of that time in a cramped space (a lot). He started taking steps backward, toward the opening in the floor; he probably looked like he was trying to get out of pistol range. Seifer, for this second, was letting him move.

“Which, as you may recall, is about when I stopped firing,” he continued, “EVEN THOUGH you were continuing to kill my guys, right in front of my eyes.”

Squall raised his eyebrows. A sentimental argument like that was pretty manipulative coming from a guy who had clearly stated he was trying to get the cuffs back on him. “And?” he asked. “What’s your point?”

 “Fuck, maybe that I don’t want to shoot you?” he asked, though he didn’t lower the pistol. Squall wasn’t so naïve anymore to not realize that Seifer was trying to pull a mind game into this; he just didn’t play mind games on principle. “Come on. You know what, I’m not even asking you to not make your escape attempt because I want to gloat about the futility of your attempts or maybe how dope my prison is. I’m telling you that there are guards with guns now and I don’t want you getting killed.”

“F—”

“Especially letting you know that I’ve got some amateur medics, and there’s no sterilized surgeon’s office. If you get lead in you, it’s probably staying in.”

“Call off your guards and tell them to let me out,” Squall continued, still slipping backward, figuring that the 0.001% chance of his offer working would be pretty cool. “Tell them you’re talking to Garden. Bide your time. Hell, we’ll send someone in here to play politics. Fucking pay us and we actually will help. You say a lot of ‘don’t want to do this’ when you could just not do it.”

Seifer took a half step forward, which told Squall he had pushed the boundary of how far he could back up for now. The issue with that was he couldn’t get a look on if he was close enough to the door or not; he honestly didn’t dare look away from Seifer right now. He was turning red in the face.

“I cannot fucking talk to you,” he said viciously, and the weird echo made something prickle inside Squall. He wasn’t comfortable with being repeated to. It either meant that he had missed something, or he was talking to someone who was skipping their needle inside. “You’re so fucking warped, dude.”

Squall raised his eyebrows again, meaning, and, so?  “You have to know that you can stop this at any time. I have a very vague assignment. I don’t like Deling. You just have to do the basic work of compromising and the whole thing is settled.”

“See?” said Seifer, still red in the face, head cocked just a little and, unfortunately, voice a little quieter. “That’s the one thing I can’t do. I can’t compromise. And I won’t.”

“Well, then, you—”

“Because you’re asking me to compromise the INTEGRITY of what I’m doing here, something I won’t try to explain to you again, because you don’t give a shit,” Seifer interrupted him, deciding to start taking a few steps forward (and Squall just had to deal with that for now) “but if you had a sense of integrity, you might get why it’s worth being kind of an asshole for.”

And that did sting, just a little, like someone had gotten a fist around his arm. He tried not to show it, to just slide back into a better stance against Seifer coming on (he was still getting closer). 

“I’ve remained loyal to the Garden my entire life,” he informed him. “Wake up. You’re the traitor.”

“A man’s not a traitor to anything if he switches to the right side,” Seifer said. “Not to anything that matters. And you make a point that Garden loyalties shift like that,” he said, taking one hand off the pistol, briefly, to smartly snap his thumb and forefinger, “so what’s the issue?”

“Loyalty to Garden—” he heard himself start up, and bit it back. He wasn’t going to waste this on him. “—Is not. Is not the same.”

“I can recite my lessons too!” Seifer said, faux-cheerfully, and it was just a little, tiny bit intimidating under the bluster. There was—there was something his face did, had always done, when he was truly angry. Something that Squall—“Believe you me, I would love to forget them. I would love to not wake up with propaganda echoing in my head. From where it was just pounded in like they branded my fucking brain. I would love to not hear the stupid songs anymore. I would love to not catch myself doing the same cruel bullshit, over and over, because I needed the good things in me burnt out for Garden. I would love to not be the man they whipped me into being, but here I am.”

Squall would politely disagree, but let’s not get tangled up into specifics right this second, when Seifer was getting just a little too close and he was five more feet away from Squall choosing where to aim. “I remember better than you do, is what I’ll tell you.”

Seifer stopped, JUST in the range where Squall didn’t feel like he could let him be. Subconscious training? Deliberate manipulation? Or was this what they used to do? It was itching at his mind, and he couldn’t place why that was. Was it just too familiar, standing across from him in the ring like this, the perfect circle of the lot fanned around them? Did he just come into the range, remembered by a twitch in his muscles, that said it was time to fight him?

In a real way, they had trained each other. He didn’t like it. He suddenly didn’t like it at all, being pushed by Seifer so tangibly when he wasn’t touching him. Feeling like there was a correct thing to do, a thing he had to do, now that Seifer was close enough to fight. He didn’t like how it felt like seeing an old photograph, hearing a song that was so popular ten years ago. The rush of an absolutely undefinable chemical spreading under his skin.

“Do you remember where we’re from?” Seifer said, in an unplaceable tone of voice.

“Wh—what?” asked Squall.

“You remember what was in Kramer’s desk?”

His heart started up bad. The list of names. Names of students of ‘special interest.’ The list their names were both on. “What?” he asked again, feeling like he had just slipped into a bad dream.

“You remember when we stopped asking if we could go home? How ‘bout anything about your sisters?

“‘Cause I do.”

“What—are you—”

The ground snarled and flexed its claws like an angry beast. A thunderous noise drowned them both out. Seifer jumped a few paces back, looking wildly to his right; Squall stayed dizzily put. He saw him open his mouth to shout something at him, he even thought he heard his words like a buzz, but the noise of the room suddenly coming apart was loud. This place had not been maintained, or else corners had been cut hard; it sounded like just about every one of the couple thousand miniature metal joints that made up the hatch were rust screeching against rust. They lurched apart in the center, a big circular jaw like a lamprey’s, causing Squall to almost stumble. Then they froze, whining and grinding.

As he fitfully regained his balance against the floor lurching in and out of movement, Seifer’s eyes were racing around, looking for something. There was probably a manual panel somewhere. Squall decided he wasn’t waiting. The center was open enough for a man to slip through, if he could navigate the unfurling gigantic steel origami lotus to get there. He had to stumble backward to get where he was going without taking his eyes off of Seifer and the rolling, sidewinding motion made him feel uncomfortably like he was at sea.

Seifer shouted again; again, Squall couldn’t hear him over the clamor. Right foot behind left, he stumbled backward. When he almost lost his footing because of a tiny crack of daylight appearing between moving metal boards, he used the tip of Hyperion to keep his balance (and regretted it, since he was more concerned about damaging Hyperion than himself). Sparks skittered along a fault line that had gotten dusty; Seifer was somehow fucking gaining on him, taking big, confident strides across the changing landscape.

And with the whole room shifting around him and Seifer getting closer, Squall felt an illogical and uncharacteristic animal stab of panic that told him he wasn’t going to get out of his cage if he didn’t get out right this second. He was used to keeping more cool as things got hot around him; typically, others’ panic made him retreat inside, kept him in a small, quiet place inside himself. But right now, this particular time, two weeks of imprisonment later, hungry and sleep-deprived and infused with he need to get away from some hard-to-describe, psychological, physical, full-body threat that Seifer’s reaching hand poised to him, his lurch towards him across the gap, he decided to jump.

Jumping had always been the plan, actually. Turning tail, bolting, and fall/leaping out of there hadn’t been. And he really couldn’t tell you if Seifer shot at him, or tried to follow him. It was too loud, the sunlight coming up through the shattered gap in the floor ws blinding, and there was something filling up the space in his throat and lungs suddenly that he usually used to clear air. Like some kind of rough stone was blocking him up.

He turned badly, scraped a hip somewhat, and fell into the sky like a bird that smacked against the window. He couldn’t even see anything on the way down. He had no choice but to curl up around the gun and try to relax for impact.

Unbeknownst to him, Selphie had timed the rescue exquisitely. He had gone and jumped too early and without planning his trajectory at all, but Selphie was there within the next ten seconds (at most) with a squealing motor that barely registered above the static in his senses. He felt the tug on his clothes; something unknown told him that it was fine. He tried to reach up for him and through a process that was about 90% Selphie working and 10% Squall not making it harder than it had to be, he was thrown badly across the back of a motorcycle with a death grip curled on his left wrist, in case all else failed. He was still cuddling Hyperion in front of him like his whole mission was to infiltrate and grab it which, obviously, it wasn’t.

He tried to say something like “Motorcycle?? Why??” to Selphie in the two seconds after he had throttled the motor back into life with a vicious kick to the gas, but his attention as taken up by clinging onto him pretty fast, pressing the uncomfortable curves of the weapon into his back. He could smell his gently-applied apricot-like haze of perfume through the shimmering disguise, the miasma of gasoline, the rattling of his disordered senses.

His sight was coming back, but what he saw felt surreal. The homogenous scorched brown landscape hurried up, people darted in from this and that side to try to get a grab at the two of them. Glistening metal and glass. Despite his grip on him, they were still both almost thrown when the bike smacked onto the Sorceress’s forcefield and shuddered like it was convulsing. But despite the wheels doing a short, terrifying little mambo and the desert air feeling like it got ten degrees hotter for no damn reason, Selphie, suddenly eight inches shorter and screaming fire with a much higher-pitched voice, kept them on the right side of biting the sand.

It took them several miles to get into equilibrium. It wasn’t easy to tear across the desert on a two-wheeler, especially if it wasn’t your normal mode of transportation, and the two of you fit on it kind of badly. Her suddenly tiny body was sweat-drenched, she had to wrench off her helmet when she realized that the way she had strapped it on for the other body just wasn’t going to work on this body, at this speed, and she didn’t have time to adjust it. Squall felt oddly sick, even though he was typically able to spend a day or two crunched up in a motor vehicle, no problem. The size and shakiness of the bike, he assumed.

They had maybe travelled a mile before the muted whumps in the background told him that he was, in fact, being pursued this time. Great. Selphie shouted something; she was easier to hear with her original voice back, but he still couldn’t parse precisely what it was. He hoped it was meant to be ‘start shooting wheels, Squall,” because that was exactly what he intended to do. Crunching to turn around in the seat with his opposite arm still curled tightly around Selphie’s waist was a mean feat, but he was feeling like a mean fucker in this moment and he intended to get a few shots off despite it all.

And he did, a few completely useless but immensely satisfying shots—Hyperion just kissed them out, still loud and percussive as any gun shot, but so fucking smooth and so direct that the whiffed into the sand like burying snakes. Not very useful in this second, but impressive enough to choke his breath in his throat as they bounded over the sands.

It took him a minute to realize she was shouting about Carbuncle, which, duh. Duh. He summoned Carbuncle on the spot, though he might have refused and started firing offensive spells instead if he was more on his game. They appeared under them like a silver serpent racing in the sands under the bike, a low whistle, a hot, harsh gust. He saw the nose of the bike glimmer garnet-pink first, and the numbing gentleness of Carbuncle’s protection swept front to back, coating them both like rain. It kind of tasted like bitter, artificial-cherry cough syrup in the back of his throat, but he tried not to back-talk Carbuncle for it. They didn’t like staying in the material realm almost as much as the average human didn’t like being frayed up by mind-numbing eternity to contact a GF.

He caught on just in time; spells were melting off of Carbuncle’s shield almost as quickly as they cast it. That didn’t leave them invulnerable to bullets, or stop Squall from shooting them, so he did exactly that. It was still nearly impossible for him to reach the handful of bikes and cars peeling after him, with less desperate and exhausted drivers, but he took comfort in the fact that they weren’t likely to hit him either. At least, not if Selphie kept fucking weaving like this, bouncing the both of them almost off the bike every other second. She hit a rock and the whole thing jumped half off the ground and shuddered so hard on reentry that Squall shot a bullet practically in the sky, wincing. Where it came down, he couldn’t guess.            

He was getting kind of worried about them maybe crashing the bike before they could lose pursuit when Selphie had a spare moment to reveal that she had junctioned Cactuar. The pursuers were riddled with needles in half a second and bursting with tiny staccato explosions. They followed for a few seconds, then started swerving, jolting, and curling to halts.

That was that, then. Squall decided he needed to hang around a few less-competent people for a while, goddamn SeeDs making him look bad. Stupid, at least.

When he finally stopped watching the pursuers all come to a halt, when he finally decided he had left them all behind, he slowly turned his head back around front, feeling the headache that had started throbbing in his forehead while he had his spine twisted on a jolting bike. He rested it on her back because he felt like he just couldn’t keep it up anymore. They were both almost fever-hot and sweat-drenched; it didn’t even feel unpleasant, right now. Nor was her sour-fruit smell, or dealing with the regular jolting of the bike as his head clattered on her spine. It felt numbing, comfortable. 

She began to gradually decrease speed to make the drive a little less dangerous. She never got particularly slow, exactly. Just slow enough that they weren’t risking a flip if they hit something, and sand fluctuations stopped making the wheels jump. He saw she was taking them south-ish, and through wracking his sluggish, slowed-down brain, he couldn’t exactly figure where they were going.

“Where are we headed?” he finally asked, after catching his breath for about half an hour. The headache, sadly, was getting worse, not better, and he was taking to keeping his eyes closed.

“Canyons,” she said. Her voice sounded steady enough. Good, nothing had hit her in the chaos while he was unaware. “Garden spruced up a few hidden bases once we heard it was war, just in case we need remote bases. And, well, if we think we need remote, hidden bases… we probably do. Squall, what the hell was going on back there?”

His kind of twisting stomach was making his throat feel hot and compelled him to say “Tell you when we get there. Who’s with you?”

“You’re already talking to just about the highest ranking officer on the ground,” she snorted. “Took Irvine with me.” She rattled off the names of a few mid-ranking SeeDs, and it did shape up into a pretty competent small party overall. “We’re spreading ourselves around the continent a little, as things look… fucky.”

“Fucky.”

“Looks that way, yeah.”

“How about Quistis?” he asked, quietly, even though he already knew the answer. Love makes you ask stupid questions.

“She’s in Esthar, dude!” exclaimed Selphie, excited enough to shout right past the disappointment she knew Squall was feeling.

He cracked his eyes open, then closed them again with a wince. “What?”

“They asked to bring back a few SeeDs as diplomats to Esthar, to keep up talks without having their diplomats stuck in a foreign war on a foreign continent. Xu said ‘well, you’ve already met Quistis’ and told her to have a great trip.”

That was all well and good. She had become a pretty confident diplomat with time and experience. “When’d she go?”

“Couple or five days back. Me and Xu have been keeping in contact with her. In completely different ways, obviously. But she docked on the Estar continent like, a day and a half ago, haven’t heard since. I assume she’s busy being the first explorer to uncharted wilderness.”

“The uncharted wilderness of the largest city ever built.”

“I don’t know what they do out there.”

“Alright,” he said, and rested his head again on Selphie as the dizzy landscape burned by him. “My contract is still on?”

“Xu shut her mouth about that. Could mean anything.”

It could. It could mean anything from ‘there is no change’ to ‘Xu is unravelling our relationship with Deling fully and entirely and can’t breathe a word to anyone’ to ‘Xu has bought a thousand shares of Deling stock and a lot of bombs and we’re in this shit now, son.’ No way of knowing. Not until she made a change she had to announce.

“She sent you all out here though.”

“Squall, we got word that Deling’s forces down here were GONE,” she said, rolling her eyes at him. Trust Selphie to not get bogged down in little stuff like mass destruction. “Whatever you were stuck in down here, we assumed it was bad. It’s a net worse overall to just let you die than have to admit to Deling that we recovered an asset he sent to die. Bad look, but whatever.”

“Oh. Thanks for putting me above that bottom line.”

“You’re carrying all our good Guardians.”

“They’re mine,” he said, mostly joking.

“I don’t care if you’ve got a personal God harem,” she informed him. “Just keep your metaphysical wizard hands off of Gogo and all is well.”

‘I don’t know what the fuck you do, Squall, but keep doing it’ was a sentiment he was pretty used to. “Not interested. You can keep them.”

“Damn right I can.”

He wondered how their relationship… what their relationship was. Selfie tended to anthropomorphize Gogo. People tended to talk about Guardians like people, but they talked about cars and guns and ships like people. He had this suspicion, a concern he did nothing with because he didn’t have a clue WHAT to do with it, that his relationship to them really was different.

“Selphie.”

“Yeah.”

“...Why a bike.”

She sucked in an audibly loud breath. “Okay so when I got to the lot someone who knew ‘me’ pulled me aside and started telling me how pumped he was because they had just gotten the new bike fixed back up after the bad scene outside of Winhill so right of the bat I was pretending I knew what had happened at Winhill which sounded UGLY by the way and so some of the other guys were coming up and there was enough people around me, okay, so I had to walk at their pace and kind of hang behind or else it would be obvious I didn’t even know what bike he was leading me to and Squall there were SO MANY they are fucking LOADED I was just kind of laughing along and it was the devil’s fucking luck I even put my hands on the right bike when we wandered up and social pressures aside he was just so EXCITED about getting the bike fixed up...

—

Squall eventually gave up watching to see where they were going as his rebelling stomach sent wave after wave of nausea, heat, and dizziness. He closed his eyes and dully felt the world go from shifting sand, to gritty ground, to uncompromising stone, cooler, worn by the low rivers he could hear cutting at the ground. The canyons; they weren’t even far from Winhill now. Selphie navigated them down into the darker, cooler, wetter depths of one of the veins that cut into the stone flesh of the earth and he felt just a little more able to breathe.

—

They finally sputtered the belabored bike to a halt (tank must have been full to the top) deep in the shadow of a cliff, so close to running water he could smell it. Despite everything, that scent had been clearing his head, so he was willing to get his incredibly angry joints off of the bike right after they stopped. Everything creaked and whined when he moved it. Everything.

The area was dim enough it didn’t take his salt-crusted eyes long to stay open. Garden had set them up a beautifully well-hidden collection of wood and steel sheet buildings, grey, dull, well-matched to the rock they were hidden in. The radio antenna stuck out hilariously, but wouldn’t be visible unless you got close. A collection of trucks, well-washed by the spray in the air, stood huddled very close to the compound, which almost looked more like a little summer camp set up than anything else. A nearby collection of small waterfalls hid their noise without threatening them with flooding; a radio desk was set up semi-conspicuously next to one of the buildings, with a pretty impressive assortment of wires, machines, and gadgetry half-hooked up.

A man who, despite the aesthetic changes he had made in the past few years (and tended to tweak again every month or so), was unmistakable as Irvine Kinneas was leaning characteristically against the nearest wall, talking to another SeeD. Irvine was stripped down pretty far; he had been spending a lot of time in the far north recently and was surely sweltering down here, canyon or no canyon. He was smoking half-heartedly, holding a cigarette that burned down as he talked. His face lit up with an insufferable dimpled smile when he saw Selphie rolling up with her prize, which morphed into kind of a precious mockery when he saw how Selphie had to surreptitiously help Squall off the bike after she parked it.

“Hyne,” he sighed, fondly.

“Yeah, he LOOKS like shit, but I gottim,” she huffed, doing her best to brace Squall’s faltering weight on her shoulder as he stood up and heaved Hyperion in front of him to lean on the bike.

“Holy—fuck,” was the second thing Irvine said, because he saw the gun Squall was carrying and was in the unique position to recognize it instantly. “Squall, what the fuck is—”

He stopped saying anything at all when he got close enough to get a turn around the gunblade. His eyes traced it as fast as they would a moving target. Selphie, who had never had the chance to see what Squall had stolen (huh, whoops), also stopped dead. Obviously, she had assumed it was HIS.

“Squall,” she said, accusatory and low, “that is not your gunblade.”

“No,” he said, shielding his brow as another burst of shakiness came on him. He was… he was not doing good, on that little sleep, with that kind of fucking drive. His thighs honestly felt half-numb.

“I can’t…” said Irvine, and held a hand forward, but didn’t touch it until Squall gave him a tired nod. He hefted it, and pulled just a little too hard for its light weight, same as Squall had done. Baffled, transfixed, he turned the gunblade around in his hands, with the careful tips of his fingers. He and Selphie both just… stared.

“He can’t. Squall,” said Selphie, and stared at his face until she came to his own conclusions. She then punched him in the shoulder which, on his honor, nearly fucking toppled him. “He can’t be! Was he! I! What!” she sputtered, trying to ask, ‘are you telling me Seifer Almasy is alive? Because I will flip my lid and go through a lot of emotions at once if you tell me Seifer Almasy is alive, so please tell me you just found this in a pile of plunder instead.’

And for the life of him he didn’t know what to say to her. It was only at the worst moments that her power to just read his face failed, the times when a wordless sigh just didn’t suffice. 

She had grown—he didn’t even know why—kind of close to Seifer near the time he had disappeared. He had been clearly, visibly losing his mind—for whatever reason, Selphie had kind of taken him on as a project. A project that really didn’t pan out. 

She did that, anyway. Improve people. And Seifer had just never improved.

“I stole it from him,” he said, succinct, stupid. He was worse at speaking the more important speaking got, it felt. “He’s—it’s—he runs it. It’s his prison. Do we have a line to Garden?” he abruptly asked Irvine, who had the less stressful expression.

“Yyyyeah,” he said, standing frozen with a cigarette going white in one hand, “and I think you’d better get on it.”

He was led over to the radio desk which, with a bit of fussing and wire-connecting, lit up with little white and green LEDs all over. Up close, he could see it was a miss-matched set of mostly retro black box technology with some newer, smaller, silver pieces, mostly in the little computer harddrive someone had hooked up to the switchboard, probably recording some kind of data. It was weird how much technology seemed to improve whenever he fucked off to another continent for long enough. He didn’t like to say he was technologically illiterate himself… he was definitely low tech, but, like,

Shit, whatever. Not important right now.

Irvine seemed capable of setting it up. He did some fiddling with the radio parts Squall mostly recognized, whistled for a while, then spoke some coordinates and a key into it. He waited a minute longer, then jeopardized Squall’s chances of ever being able to talk to Xu by saying hi to her himself.

He get about two words in (with that stupid smile on his face) before Selphie was whacking him with the corner of her palm and hissing NO, CUT IT OUT, NO, YOU DICK. Squall let the Selphie ‘n’ Irvine show play out in his periphery as he said hey to the rest of the SeeDs, stumbling out of their midday naps (they were probably taking watch shifts at night) to congratulate him on being alive. Which, this time, he appreciated.

Before long, Selphie had yanked the headset away from her man and was shoving it at Squall, who took it with some awkwardness, since it was kind of old and had some wires poking out. He was kind of worried it would spark him when he put it on, but instead, it filled up his ears with low, comforting static. He actually got a little distracted by how nice it was to not really hear anything, like standing on the shoreline. He waited a little too long and heard Xu’s voice, a little dull, pretty static-coated, saying, “Leonhart?”

Her voice made him feel an uncomfortable relief, like he was actually certain he was safe now, in this unlikely moment, listening to a thousand-mile-away voice through some wires. “Commander,” he said, “I need to report.”

“Let me interrupt,”  she started, though she didn’t need to ask, “to say that I am happy to hear you’re alive.”

“Thank you.”

“Report.”

“…” And Squall faced the enormity of his fucking report. What parts did she know already? Hell, what did he not know after this much absence? How far had the violence spread? “…Sorry if I repeat information you already have,” he awkwardly began. “I’ve been—”

“Not a problem,” she interrupted. She sounded distracted, like something else was going on in the room. Honestly, Squall was more comfortable that he wasn’t taking up her undivided attention. “Report whatever you deem important anyway.”

Alright, then. “As you likely know, the missile base was attacked and potentially brought down on the night I arrived, which would be the last day I had contact with Garden,” holy shit. “I have reason to believe the Galbadian Army’s fortunes only decreased since then.”

“Correct,” said Xu, still distracted. “Your comrades can fill you in on specifics.”

“My point of contact was General Beatrix. She was actually the person who put in the request for a SeeD. I got the impression Deling was not involved initially.” Xu did hum with some interest at that. “Last I saw her was…” Shit, he couldn’t remember his dates. He wasn’t sure he knew his dates. “The day after that. We rendezvoused at the Dingo Prison Complex, which had been captured by rebel forces, and…”

Fucking Hyne. How could he even summarize? “There was some back and forth,” he eventually said. “After some location switching, I was captured. I… There….”

That didn’t work. Different tactic. “The takeover of the prison was a long-term, planned endeavor, by a veteran group of political terrorists that have been active for a long time. Their ranks include Rinoa Heartilly, who I have positively identified as the sorceress. Her abilities. Are. Impossible to gauge. At—” Fuck. “At levels also impossible to gauge. She swatted aside my Guardians.”

And when he said that out loud, suddenly, angry heat blossomed in his cheeks. He had to actively ignored the others staring at him. “It’s not… We… would need a further inquiry into what sorceress magic is like and how powerful it is. Her abilities were… beyond what I was used to. And.”

He cut himself off. Not helpful. He had made his point. “She is still currently running the prison that her forces infiltrated and, apparently, succeeding in securing a powerbase for herself in the desert.  Though she is in a power dyad with.” Fuck, he didn’t want to “A rebel leader with some clout who has been gather a power base in the street, it seems, for a long time.”

“Understood. What would you say—”

“It’s Seifer.” Oh for fuck’s “The partner of the sorceress. Is Seifer Almasy.”

It was never good when Xu had nothing to say in response to a line gone dead. “It appears that” No, nope, that would be stupid “I mean. I positively identified him as well. He. I am certain.”

“I—know that—you wouldn’t say so if you weren’t,”

“He’s not. I couldn’t. Make a mistake here.”

“What would you say were the size of his forces?”

That was Xu. She cut right through. Squall stumbled, feeling like a child, through his estimation (at this point thoroughly researched) of their manpower, weapons, and machinery. He had learned in prison about how long the group had been operating as is, how good their infiltration system was, and how dead-set radical each and every brain in that building was. The picture he painted for Xu was not pretty, he knew that. But it was only as he spoke his way through it that he realized how truly horrifying this was.

How on earth had they actually defied the whole state and remained in control of their rebel power base this long? How had Squall not even seen an invading force to come destroy them, after all this time? The thought that no one else could was equally impossible as the thought that no one else dared . Were the rebels being let to run free here—had an internal faction allowed for this—had every force Deling posessed become so incapacitated that his hands were tied?

The situation had gotten much, much deeper while he was in prison.  He wasn’t very excited to find out how.

“…Interesting,” said Xu, a sharpness in her voice. “That’s not what I’ve been told. Thank you. Leonhart.”

It was deeply flattering, and also correct, of her to assume Squall was the one telling her the truth. “Ma’am.”

“Listen up,” she said, which was a little rare. “The situation is getting complex, and it’s clear now—more clear now—that we’re getting a lot of false information at Garden. Sit tight for now; either I will contact you tomorrow or you’ll get an emergency missive when one gets through. Assume every missive is emergency, frankly. Ask Tilmitt to fill you in on the combat situation as it stands.”

“Ma’am.”

“I may have no choice but to move in all of you as a unit, so be prepared to potentially decamp,” she finished up. “Tell everyone to get some rest tonight and be ready for a potential location change. Good luck.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and waited to be hung up on, which he was in short order.

He took the headphones off, and stood still for a minute.

“Hey,” said Selphie, and put her hands on them. He let her take them. “You—”

“How’s he been?” asked Irvine.

“Irvine,” Selphie snapped.

“What? That’s our guy back from the dead, I want to know how he’s doing.”

“Fine, obviously, he has a castle,” Selphie grumbled, looking more peeved at Seifer’s success than anything else. “I can’t—”

“He’s not ‘our guy,’” Squall informed Irvine, though he was suddenly incapable of looking at him. “He’s gone out of his way to make that clear.”

“—Okay, right,” Irvine immediately folded, “’my guy’ in the same sense that the uncool dealer you worked with when you were 16 and didn’t know better is ‘your guy.’” He wasn’t sure what Irvine’s train of thought was exactly, but he wasn’t getting on board.  “I mean what’s he up to now, how is he looking, is he married, has he got kids now—”

“Yes, to the sorceress, and I wouldn’t even be surprised—”

“Does crime actually pay—he what.”

“It appears so, he has a stock of brand new armored cars like I’ve never—”

“Back up,” Irvine said, physically putting his hands out to get Squall to back the fuck up. “MARRIED the sorceress.”

Selphie sort of started squawking, a wordless exclamation of how incredibly she felt something about that statement. They were sort of crowding Squall in, so he very purposefully started walking backward. “He obviously did,” Squall defended himself, not thinking about what he was saying or that he had to say it. The words felt so solid. “He told her about me—she knew—she actually recognized me by sight—no—” He hadn’t connected these exact dots until this second, talking them through—“she recognized me by seeing Punishment. That was why he sent her back to get me, after I escaped the first time.”

Irvine burst into laughter as Selphie slowly leaned toward Squall, arms crossed. “You mean to tell me I had to break you out of a prison you already escaped once?”

“They didn’t get me the first time,” Squall argued. “They didn’t—we raided it the morning after the attack on the base. Stole a car. Some other crap. Rode out to a fuckign shanty camp. Then he sent the fucking sorceress back after me to take me back to the prison. And I was up to here,” he said, snapping a hand up to his temple, “in prescription oxy at the time and getting glass pulled out of my shins so I went.”

“Like,” said Selphie, pronouncing every syllable with deliberation, “like. You WENT? You got on your feet and went with her??”

Well, he couldn’t lie to Selphie. “Yes! Beatrix’s unit was in an emergency bunker, and my mission specifically—”

Selphie kind of screamed in her throat and came at him with open palms and the intent to cause him some serious damage. Logically, her frustration was understandable. He could see why she thought that all of this had been avoidable, and he was having a hard time explaining how… Like, even to himself, he was having a hard time explaining how the sorceress was unavoidable when present. She had an inescapable force. He can’t recall if he even thought about refusing her summons. In fact, he can’t hardly recall anything but the image of her drifting like a shadow on the sands, pulling his gaze like the eyespots of the cobra pull in the fieldmouse. And how her white hands gave or took what was inside him with their touch. Harrowing. Like standing next to a hurricane.

“But what I’m pulling from that,” said Irvine, who was watching his girlfriend go for Squall’s throat without any concern, “is that you did jack his gun, but you don’t have yours?”

Squall froze so suddenly that Selphie actually got a solid grip around his neck before she realized she had won too easily, which was no fun. “…And,” said Squall, “you don’t?”

“…No, man,” said Irvine, one eyebrow rising, “How the fuck was I supposed to know YOU didn’t have it?”

 —

Squall had to be pretty forcibly cooled down. They followed him as he stormed in a circle around the compound for a minute before gradually coercing him to sit inside. He didn’t WANT to sit down and drink a cup of coffee, but after being told to chill enough times, well, he supposed he just HAD to, didn’t he.

A somber chill came semi-naturally when he began to actually listen to Selphie and Irvine’s account of the past 16 (!) days. Predictably, Deling & co. had been working overtime to suppress any useful information as much as possible. (Garden was working overtime to uncover that information, and so the dance of ages was danced again.) Expertly playing Deling’s perverse need to make sure no one knew anything, these rebels and what appeared to be their outlying branches were carefully avoiding violence and just stealing fucking everything instead.

“Cars, guns, food, cash, livestock, people, whole ass infrastructure, you name it,” said Irvine, sounding insubordinately impressed. “They’re just taking things. Raids specifically for acquisition, except they don’t stop. Since they won’t fight so much after the initial teardown, Deling doesn’t engage since, again, no one is supposed to know that there’s a war on. Especially not that Galbadia is losing. And the more they lose, the less anyone can know about it. So sorceress-side keeps stealing instead of fighting, Galbadia refuses to address it, and the fronts they got pretending to be social services aren’t set up to recover or recompense people’s property in the first palace, let alone in an emergency.”

“No, they just won’t do it,” Squall agreed confidently. Social security had always been hilariously phony in Deling’s Galbadia; the state didn’t serve you, they used the information you gave to arrest people. You’re supposed to be eating that sense of justice afterwards, because they’re sure not helping you get that property back. There had been an aborted attempt to third-party social services coming out of Balamb island a few years back but last he heard, that had fizzled out without funds and support.

“So they just take stuff and the lockdown gets tighter,” Irvine continued, in agreement. “And as far as we, or anyone knows, they haven’t sent a word about the good chunk of their forces they just sent to die in Dingo either. No news—people at home have to just assume business as usual. They just don’t know everyone’s dead.”

Squall’s fingers tensed around his lukewarm cup of coffee. “Everyone.”

“Well, we’re having to assume that. Facts are that Deling is getting no news about the force in the Desert, we don’t see them, and anyone who actually does say anything tells us that they saw a lot of dead soldiers and busted bunkers. I’m forced to conclude they pretty much mowed the army and stole their stuff.

“Not just them either. Garrison at _____, troops at _____ and _____; we have to physically go there to find out, but they’ve been quietly wiped out or sent on the run. Hard to tell. Empty places. Stripped to the walls. Fucking errie.”

Squall shook his head, but not because he disbelieved him. “It’s chaos in there. But because they have so much stuff, people, loot, and no organization. And the sorceress…” He thought about it. Was the power he had seen enough to roll an army over? Supported with enough guns, bombs, and ground troops, why not? Especially when they were facing a haughty state that hadn’t expected defeat. “...They’re in a good position. The leaders have managed to make treaties with just about every rebel faction and street gang on the ground. I’m sure it’s a temporary alliance, but they’ll keep it together for as long as they keep beating Deling up.”

“Maybe,” Selphie argued. “Loose alliances can be broken up pretty easy. If we stay in contract with Deling, we’re probably going to have to get into some good ol’ sowing seeds and selling rumors.”

“And what’s with that?” asked Squall, curious. “When I left we were talking about wiggling out of this altogether.” He certainly wasn’t the only person who wanted Garden out of here.

“Meeehhhh,” said Selphie, waving her hand. “Xu business. I dunno.”

 “We’re kind of locked in right now, as far as I can tell the situation, and you know I never quite ‘get’ the contract situation,” Irvine continued, as a man who truly never ‘got’ the contract situation. “Deling signed for us, and the Rebels won’t so there’s no conflict of interest. We are stretched a little thin, but we would be lying if we said we couldn’t spare ANYONE. If you had died on contract we could’ve managed, but that wasn’t happening,” he continued with a wink. “So right now we don’t have a great excuse to wiggle out and we keep making bank as Deling pays top dollar to not get his OWN people, who have to stay in the dark about the thefts and the debts and the other stuff that makes him look bad, involved in intel that a SeeD can do for him. And it makes it easier to get our own hands on that info, so, it’s gonna remain pretty advantageous unless the whole continent blows up again.”

(Like it did last time? Said no one. Ten years ago when Garden got torn up from the inside fighting Deling’s last stupid border conflict? The one that killed so many? )

But this was a little less stupid, wasn’t it? There was a little something else. Her. the sorceress. That Enemy of Mankind he has supposedly trained half his life for. And wasn’t that just going splendid, he thought, with a bad little twist in his stomach, listening to the news get worse.

—

(“Hey, we’ll kick Lori out if you want to stay with us for the night,” Irvine had said, probably watching something in him he hadn’t wanted to be seen. Like something dripping out between the cracks.

“No,” he had said. “I want four walls to myself. And a door with a lock.”)

—

Original Note:

Me, after every chapter: man I can't wait to get to the next chapter, wait'll y'all see the next chapter

I'm going through a particularly punishing summer semester and some.... life things ;u; It's made writing pretty slow, but I'm not worried about keeping Timing going. Every time I do sit down to write I get right back into the flow of things because I am just having so much fucking fun with this one. I write a scene as long as I like and I end it the second I get bored. Then I think about what would be fun to write next and I write that next. Winning formula

Brief notes: I felt it was correct to use the pronouns of whatever body Selphie is using at the moment. That's free for the reader to interpret however you like! Sorry if it causes any narrative confusion. Similarly, for reasons I don't recall, I chose 'they/them' for Carbuncle, I hope it made sense grammatically.

I wrote some kind of vague 'Irvine looks different now' description because, well, in my experience people change how they look from age 18 to age 28, especially when they care about how they're perceived as much as Irvine -u- But the problem was that in my head, Timing!Irvine looks VERY different, and I didn't want a very different appearance to be jarring to the reader. So, I want you to feel free to imagine him however you want, whether it's totally different from canon or whether you're more comfortable with him being on-model. And I can see the version in my head and you can see the one in yours and it's good -u- I think most of them look rather different, the only one I purposefully describe is Seifer because a. he keeps it no-nonsense and b. he's our romantic hero, believe it or not, really, he is, I'll get there

At some point I use underscores for unnamed places; that's all it is, unnamed other towns and areas that theoretically exist but never show up in-canon. Just blanks.

Also 'Lori' isn't anyone from the FF canon, I just needed a name and picked the name of a cool coworker from like three jobs ago ha ha ha. OK!! Enough from me!!

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Hold on—

He felt restlessly full, like he had eaten, drunk, and rested too much, and it was sitting so heavy inside him. Like he had swallowed a plush cushion. He had felt this sensation before. What it was was the body struggling to squeeze nourishment back into itself after starvation. It didn’t feel like being sick, exactly. It felt like being a suitcase jammed so full that someone was sitting on his back to press down as they tried to force the zipper up his side. 

It was dark in the shut-off cabin, perfectly dark, with everything that could possibly be seen turned off at night. The blissful dark that made it impossible to see beyond himself. 

It turned out to be too much dark, too, like the one sandwich had been too much food, and the glasses of water and coffee just too much for his dried-up desert system. It started filling him, the total dark. He became aware uncomfortably of the size of it, darkness that stretched like never ending potential over the vastness of the unpopulated wastes all around him. No walls, roads, barriers. These little habitations, just like nests clinging to leafless tree branches.

(“Do you remember where we’re from?”)

The dark wasn’t too dark, it was too much. Too gigantic. He felt like he could stop existing in this tiny room and float all the way down the darkness, borne on a quick current, back where he came from, the prison, the Garden, Timber, Balamb, all the way across the ocean that doesn’t change when you travel it for days to uncharted Centra. 

(‘Cause I do.”)

Shiva? He asked, looking for a point of stillness in the vastness.

You’re drifting, she observed. When she spoke something like a freezer burn, psychologically, bored a shifting mark on him. It roamed as if searching. 

I’m— and he wasn’t sure how to describe it. 

No, she continued, boring that brain freeze a little deeper down, you’re drifting. Be careful .

What do you mean?

You’re lapping at your own shores, pushing a little farther out of yourself, she sighed, and he could feel it, painfully, how he beat at his own boundaries. You’re usually so well-contained in one body, and one time. Seeing you spreading out like this, like you have been recently, really shows one that you weren’t made for it.

What do you mean, like I have been? ‘Spread out?’

You grow thin, less connected to things, pale; they fill you with drugs to pluck at your consciousness, or it's done by magic, by violence; you’ve been beaten at. 

Maybe she, maybe he saw an image like bug guts leaking out of a carapace that had been cracked and squished. Coming out of yourself. Prey. It’s not that bad, he reestablished, replacing it with a picture of how he thought he was now; scratched, punctured, bruised, and in one piece. Bad reaction. Starvation.

For now, she agreed. Right now, right this second, you are struggling to let food and water and sleep back in. 

He knew where her argument was going. She didn’t typically state it all the way; making and taking ground was human business. Business for people who can lose things. She never will. There’s always ‘something.’ You always find a warning sign.  

I don’t want you to crack again, she reprimanded him. I don’t like being so far from you, whenever your mind eludes your control.    

It won’t happen, Squall said. Except briefly. 

(The list of things that could actually sever him from connection to a Guardian used to contain exactly one entry: himself. He could do it, when properly beside himself. He could snap himself from himself. He wasn’t comfortable sharing that list with one Rinoa Almasy.)

(“Do you remember where we—”)

Shut it. 

He’s weighing on you.

What did you expect? asked Squall, bitterly, and icily. Like the little snaps of lake ice in the spring.

Shiva didn’t seem to have expectations for his personal relationships, except that he handled them with common sense. It would be unwise to trust his claims again. 

I know , he reminded her. And he did know. It was being dredged up hard now. A riptide he was struggling to force back under the ice. In fact, he realized he had been trying to swallow these memories since the second he saw Seifer again, with his bullet stuck in his shoulder. Wounds he hadn’t even felt. And a treacherous sense of safety, something between an urge to slip right back into how it used to be and the compulsion to open old wounds. It felt like a habit nagging at him, it felt like how his body started itching after a few days without a shower. Didn’t he just want to strip down and clean it all off?

He had long ago convinced himself and internalized that going over the painful memories again, and again, and again, didn’t change anything at all. All he would do by obsessing over the memorizes is crystalize them. It would make a hard, solid shape for them, and weigh him down like they were stones. 

Which is why he couldn’t even recall the last time he wondered about Seifer, let alone mourned him. He couldn’t even remember so many of these feelings, these forgotten fucking haunts, and it felt like they were rising out of a grave in him. And it sucked, and it repulsed him, and he wanted to open the coffin lid. 

(“‘Cause I do.”)

Perhaps if just to remind yourself why—

No reason, he interrupted her. There's no reason to bring it all back. It doesn’t change anything. He clearly hasn’t changed—

(“I didn’t know it was YOU until I hit you in the shoulder—which, as you recall—)

SHUT IT. 

Were he only a God like me, said Shiva, with typical divine amusement, I could stop his mouth. But he is human like you; that’s your prerogative. 

That’s not him talking , sighed Squall, that’s me. 

I know that the location of your thoughts is your own body. 

I mean he’s not MAKING me think anything. It’s my fault. I’m the one who keeps (“Do you remember where we’re from?”) —and I keep seeing him. I don’t know what it is—

It was the way he reached out to you, wasn’t it, Shiva noted, rhetorically, because she could see as well as he did the jolting image of Seifer reaching his hand toward him as Squall turned and ran away to fall out of the building. It seemed to be trying to superimpose itself on everything. 

Yes , Squall admitted, in frustration. (He had given Shiva the keys to the backdoor of his mind so long ago; it took him years, but he had gotten used to her knowing the truth of what was happening inside of him.) So stupid. Why that, of all things?

If you can’t tell why something sticks out to you in its own context, darling, then it’s attached itself to another context. 

...Like what? He asked, reluctant, and pulled in by the fatalism of her definitive voice.

—

Squall was seventeen. He was relieved that all of that growing up shit was over. 

It was a gloomy morning and he didn’t have anything better to do. 

He had gotten about as far as the hallway before he saw his _______ waiting outside. Not particularly waiting for him, he had one arm crossed over another, he was looking over the hills of Balamb, out into the horizon. But he was waiting for him, or why else would he be standing there? Seifer didn’t have nothing he could do instead. 

There was something nice about being able to watch him from above, behind the tinted glass, where Seifer couldn’t see him. He wasn’t sure why it was comfortable, hoovering just out of his view, observing, but not being observed. And he was seventeen and not going to figure it out. As a matter of principle, that is. He just wasn’t going to think about it. 

Instead, he hefted Revolver on his shoulder and pointedly ignored the nervous squirming in his stomach as he walked down the hall, and out a side door, the world shifting with the rush of the doors. The lukewarm and measured air of the Garden was pushed behind him by the cooler, greener air of the morning outside. He flinched a little at the feeling; Seifer leaned so contentedly against the wall in his coat that Squall had to assume he was actually comfortable in the chill. Or else he had fallen back asleep. 

“Hey,” Squall said, annoyed. 

Seifer gave him the fakest fucking unconcerned glace. “Hey.” 

...And Squall waited, but apparently, it was a hard-to-get day today. “You want something?” 

“From you?” Seifer asked with a scoff. A scoff, and a smile. 

Squall fumed. He knew he was being played with, but he wasn’t sure how to play. He turned around and kind of angrily scuffed some grass down with his boot.

“You up for sparring?” asked Seifer, pretending it was unconnected to the previous conversation. 

Squall responded with audible exasperation. He swung up Revolver to his back, to carry it over his shoulder. “Whatever.”

Seifer sort of huffed at him. Squall wasn't even sure what emotion it was trying to convey, and he was mad that he cared. It was probably just conceit anyway. Seifer started walking; Squall decided that he was still going to follow him. 

The rolling hills of the Alcald Plains were threatening rain that morning. It was darker outside than in. Clouds weren’t rolling, exactly; they were there, but gray, heavy, and stagnant. 

Squall followed him up green hills to a place near the caves, where the ferns and wildflowers never managed to quite cling on to the warm black stone. This was where they typically went; not so far from Garden that it was a bother, not so close that they could be easily watched from inside. It wasn’t ‘their place’ (gross) exactly, but he couldn't recall anyone else feeling like they could use it for anything in a while.

...Well, why not go to one of a hundred comfortable, grassy hills instead?

Seifer looked out over the plains when they reached the hill’s summit; what he was looking at, Squall would never know. There was nothing out here. Maybe he was just stalling. 

Because Seifer kept losing, lately.

“Hey,” said Squall, tapping Revolver lightly against his side, where the metal clattered on the zipper of his pocket. 

Seifer looked at him from the side. “You unloaded that thing this time, right?” he asked.

Squall looked at him with withering derision. “No.” 

He had. It hadn’t been loaded in days. There really wasn’t a reason to, when classes were over and everyone was just taking remedial exams or preparing for the SeeD test. Except for Squall, who had been catching up on about two years of sleep, thanks for asking. 

Whether Seifer took him at his word or not didn’t really matter. The response would be the same, a glare that said he knew him. Familiar. Seifer had already drawn his conclusion and decided he was correct, as usual. “Well, you ready?”

There were times when this whole thing felt so tired. This rivalry. There are times when it felt like something he didn’t stop doing because he couldn’t, like he couldn’t stop eating and sleeping and going to class. There were times when he didn’t say ‘no, fuck off’ just because something in him, older, demanding the deciding vote, told him he was going out with him anyway. That today was another day he either won a moment’s flushed victory with more pain, or he went through it all and felt like a fucking loser anyway. 

Seifer, who had just asked to make sure Squall didn’t have bullets in his gun, spun the barrel of his and snapped it into place with a smile that Squall could only describe as sadistic. He reached a hand out—

He reached a hand out and beckoned to him.

Squall forgot in an instant that he had just felt like it was all so tired, rote, pointless, fighting for nothing. He forgot about it like he always forgot about it, and why he would or wouldn’t do it, like he always forgot everything. He felt like nothing when the battle adrenaline hit him, he felt empty. The fear of violence filled him up. 

You don’t feel tired and anxious and stupid and loney when you feel like nothing. He slid his foot back and got his hand on the hilt of his blade. 

Seifer curled in his fingers to tell him to get fucking going. 

When he came charging at Seifer and smacked him broadside with his blade, when Seifer barely blocked it and he forced him to step back, it just felt good. It felt like doing something right, and that was what mattered.

He remembers rushing at each other, maybe half a dozen times—well-practiced blocks and parries, moves they had worn into each other, mostly predictable responses to mostly predictable attacks—and how he could feel that Seifer was on his game today, energetic, awake, but so was he. Sure, Squall was personally feeling tired and stressed, but still sharp. He can feel that he’s pushing Seifer back by the tip of his blade (and it feels so good). He can feel that Seifer is defending, that Squall’s pushing him further back from the center, farther off his balance. 

Then something fucks up. Someone fucks up. Squall blamed it on the rain, for a while. He blames it on himself now. Bad footing, he just got too confident for a second and pushed himself too far into Seifer’s space. He got too sure of himself, he got haughty, and Seifer saw an opportunity. Seifer smacked his blade fucking spinning out of his hands, he pushed him back, and back; Squall got Revolver back but the fight didn’t feel right after that moment. It felt off. He felt off. He felt flustered. He felt suddenly like he was doing it wrong, like Seifer was still sharp, tough, and strong, and Squall was losing again. And he was ashamed, he was scared, because he wasn’t measuring up, he wasn’t matching him, wasn’t on his level. 

He remembers feeling hot with anger and just tearing at him. Stupid, ineffectual, easily blocked slices, over and over, until Seifer got sick of his shit. 

And then he was blinking through the blood gushing out of the wound that would scar him for life. Literally. And then he could see Seifer’s hand, reaching, through the haze, and then his memory grows… doubtful. 

—

He can, he thinks, remember Seifer flinching away from the tip of the blade when Squall went screaming up to hurt him as hard as he had just been hurt. He remembers him kind of… it’s hard to describe. Seifer stood very still. He wasn’t… he must have not had time to block the blow, because he didn’t. He remembers Seifer wincing away from it, but it was like he was waiting for it. Like he suddenly forgot how to parry, or something, and the upswing of Squall’s blade had to dig into his face and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It was like it was supposed to happen, or like it couldn’t happen to just one of them. 

And then Seifer didn’t talk about it when they both showed up in the evening on the boat to Dollet to take their SeeD exams, the slits on their faces both red and raw. Almost identical, because Squall had thoughtlessly, perfectly mimicked Seifer’s vicious strike.

—

…Your strike, which perfectly matched his; his strike, which perfectly matched yours, Shiva mused, as her breath froze the waters outside Dollet and turned the memory into a grave, his arm, his reaching grasp; there is a reason you reacted with terror to him reaching out to you.

—

Squall was fifteen. He doesn’t remember what led up to this moment. At the time, he might have not even known what was going on. He doesn’t hardly remember that far back at all. He does know his life was dark, even then, like he moved through a sludge. And he doesn’t remember why life was a slow, stupid drip, like water seeping into the gutter, if he even knew it at the time.

He does remember this moment, when a hand had suddenly snarled into his hair. He remembers he hadn’t expected it, that nothing seemed to lead up to it. Like he had forgotten Seifer was even there, but he was going to get his attention now. 

He sees Seifer’s hand reaching for him, the palm stretched open, then the fingers tangled in his hair. “HEY,” he said, “You look at me.” 

Squall knows he didn’t say anything. Nor did he move to defend himself. (He didn’t, at that age. He would be jumpier within the next year, when they started training each other.) He stared at Seifer instead, confused, distracted, his eyes skittering around to find a place to actually land. 

“Quit that shit,” Seifer said; Squall must have quit whatever it was, since he didn’t know what it had been. “Show yourself more respect.”

“What the fuck,” Squall thinks he said to Seifer, or something else that conveyed ‘dude, you’re being weird’ to him. Honestly, he can hardly remember what he, himself, said or did at the time. He remembers everything that Seifer did clearly, to the twitches of the skin under his eyes. He was right there, so close. A comet blasting through his mostly night-sky past. 

“I’m going to need you to fucking carry yourself right,” Seifer told him, kind of angry, kind of covering up the wide-eyed nervousness of a boy who doesn’t know if he’s going to pull this off. “You’re my rival, now, you got that?”

“Your what?” Squall probably asked, making Seifer turn just a little pink in the cheeks. 

“I said you’re my rival,” he continued on, anyway, despite being obviously embarrassed. “That makes me the guy you’ve got to measure up to, okay?”

“Wh—” (and here’s where things became very clear, the second he got angry, that was when he could remember, he could feeling how the palms of his hands went numb, how he was kind of diagonal in his seat, with a bar pressing oddly into his thighs) “Measure up to you? Like?” I’m not as good as you? 

“Yeah, so shape up,” Seifer snapped, compulsively tilting his head away, avoiding Squall’s eyes. (That nervous avoidance wasn’t yet the dismissive derision it would become.) “I’m not going to waste my time on someone who can’t keep up with me.” 

Squall immediately lunged in with a rough, juvenile punch to his jaw and to his horror, Seifer blocked it easily and crunched his fingers into a little ball with his already bigger fist. (Because some fucking dickhead got to be taller faster than him, so wh—) “Like that,” Seifer said, whose eyes were on him now that he had at least tried to land a hit, “Is that seriously all you got? If you’re gonna be—”

Squall came at him with undecided, stupid aggression. He smacked Seifer’s other forearm with his free hand, tried to shove him out of his chair, but he just didn’t have the force yet. He momentarily freed both hands, and so the two of them grappled, briefly, fumbling as much as fighting. Squall’s palms were already sweating; he seemed to just slip off of him, like he was scrabbling at a shut door. He thought he could at least throw his weight into the other boy, tip him over, and that’s where he was dead wrong. He got one solid whack into Seifer’s torso, diving in, like he was going to slip right though,

And Seifer grabbed him by snagging each of the fingers of his right hand into his hair, and yanking. First backward, tearing some (but not too many) strands out at the root, then shoving his head down, fast enough that he forced the rest of his body down with him. He hit the ground with one knee. It stung. 

“See? Like—shit—” Seifer momentarily fumbled his grip on his head, as Squall struggled, but with a terrible twist at his skull, he held him fast. “I got you just like that! That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, with another harsh squeeze. And yet, Squall can’t hear the malice in his voice. Or maybe time has weathered it from his memory. “I mean that’s not going to be good enough. That’s not going to be good enough for Garden, and that’s not going to be good enough for me. 

“Shape up. You’ve got to be on my level now.”

Squall remembers feeling slightly limp under the grip in his hair, when every movement made his skull sting with pain again. It must be how a cat feels when scruffed. He was as angry as fucking ever but it felt so weirdly quiet. Like his ears were ringing so hard he couldn’t hear the noise.

—

...But it's not like you keep a guy scruffed forever. He had to have let go of his head eventually. Squall wonders when that was. He better remembers the sudden quiet, with fresh new pain sparking down his skin from his crown, and a seed of fury wavering inside, but suddenly feeling so quiet. The best comparison he has is that it was like going to bed at night, exhausted, and finally letting go of the stress and fear and going to sleep.  

—

...and there must have been something earlier than that… there must have been, but...

He doesn’t think they had fought like that before, exactly… Something about it had been new, and strange. He felt it had changed things, totally, at that time. 

But whatever had come before it was lost entirely. He was fifteen, and that was as far back as he could go.

—

There’s no hierarchy to being ‘rivals.’ There’s no standard, no signifier. There’s nothing you do to declare it to be true. No one’s going to recognize it; it might not mean anything. Or it might. A completely unrecognized relationship, outside of society’s bounds, has the frighteningly reactive power to be exactly what you want it to be. No one will analyze or censor it, and no one will say it isn’t what it’s supposed to be. 

He remembers knowing Seifer meant it. Even though it wasn’t necessary, even though it was a relationship they made up, he never pulled his punches again. Not even in private, with just the two of them. From that day on (and he can’t remember why it was so important, what even made Seifer decide that this is what they were now), from then on, he was dead-set on being Squall’s play-enemy, ready with a blow, ready to take one. From then on, they made each other harder fighters every single day. Better matched, better trained, better tempered. It was every single day and no one even remembered to ask a question about a bruise here or a split lip after a few months. They made everyone else accept it.

He can’t recall ever talking about it. 

But it kept going, as they settled into the same height, as Squall slowly came to match Seifer in strength, as one got to be the better shot and the other got to be the better swordsman. The eternal fight went on unabated as they marked each other on their foreheads, as one passed the SeeD test while the other failed, when war broke out, when they were put into ranks, when Seifer finally passed, deployment, bombing missions, body recovery, trenches, alleyway fighting; as the world went to pieces, Seifer was his closest, bitter rival, and he never pulled his punches, and they never held each other back, until the day—

—

Let’s not. No—

—

Squall was nineteen, almost twenty, and his hearing was coming back. There was an unpleasant squealing accompanying it, but it was coming back. He could tell, because the weird whisper of a couple dozen spells being cast at once was seeping back in. Spellcasting makes this noise, when there’s enough of them; a sound like living wind, all the air being pulled and pushed around. Though he could hear the magic, he couldn’t see much—it was very dim, wherever he was. Which was a problem, because it had been broad daylight a second ago.

Motherfucker. He just went dark. He had drained himself too dry of spells and passed out. He was somewhere cp;d and paved, when he had just been in the mud—he could still feel it sticking to his skin, weighing him down. The closest thing he could see whas a boot about five inches from his nose. 

He tried to protest, and it sounded pretty gross. He had gotten stopped up and hadn't hacked anything out. 

As he started curling in on himself to cough, the man above him saw that he was awake, and crouched a little closer to the floor. Seifer had been literally standing over him, foot on either side of his unconscious body. Squall knew it was Seifer that fast because it was the only tenable option he wanted to consider, and because, when he curled his fist into the back of Squall’s jacket and yanked his torso up from the ground in one motion without upending himself, Squall figured there were only so many options for that combination of finesse/brute strength. 

“You gonna puke?” Seifer asked, annoyed, distracted, and raw. 

Squall whacked his hand away so ineffectually he may as well have not bothered. Shit. He was shaking with withdrawal. Seifer didn’t say anything, though, which was a testament to how long they had been doing this with each other. He COULD point out that Squall was flat on his ass right now, but why would he? 

“What’s happening out there?” Squall asked instead. 

“Hell if I know,” Seifer admitted, doing something small with his left hand that made Hyperion swivel and glitter. “Thought this was just another routine miserable slog, then we opened up the cellar door under a dive bar and hell broke out.”

Squall could… kind of remember. They had been given a target to bust up and root out, and they had gone in with about three SeeDs and a fucking troop of Galbadian soldiers. Squall hadn’t even asked what they were seizing, so he wasn’t sure if some surprise private dungeon composed of compressed magical power was what they expected or not. The place wholesale blew up like a fucking engine when Squall fired his first shot into it, colors, sounds, shreiking pressure. Either he had splatted some kind of master magician, or…

Hell, he didn’t know ‘or what.’ “What are we doing over here,”

“You went down, idiot,” Seifer informed him, and, after another glance down the road satisfied him that no one had noticed where he had drug Squall off to, he lowered himself halfway down to Squall’s level. He put one knee on the ground, close to Squall’s hand, but had the other leg tensed to jump up, just in case. “What did you do, blow all your spells in five minutes?”

...Something like that. He had been… well… weird, it was already fuzzy in his memory. Someone, something, had hammered him hard, and Squall had sent out spell after spell to try to hammer back. He hadn’t been carrying quite so many as he could have been. He had given a whole bunch of them, stupidly, to a soldier who asked. “...Just too many at once.”

“Fuck,” said Seifer, more like a judgement than a curse. He used his arm to pull Squall more firmly off of the ground, so that he was sitting up straight. It meant Seifer was practically curled around him in front, holding his gun in his other hand, but Squall didn’t care, at the time. The squealing in his ears was softening, a little; he could hear the magic better, the stomping, the growling of motors. 

“Shit, it’s not over—”

“Sure isn’t,” said Seifer, doing half a back-glance. “Hold on,” he said, and Squall held on. 

Seifer did something kind of out-of-bounds; that is, he grabbed Squall’s hand, half by the wrist, half by the palm. He didn’t mean out-of-bounds in that this guy wasn’t meant to touch him; it happened. But touch typically meant he had to be prepared for an attack, and that was clearly not what was going on. It made him tense up anyway. His skin crawled where Seifer grabbed him, where his fingers slipped up his tired skin. It was because it was suffused with the urge to fight back, to get out of his grip, but he wasn't being fought. Instead, he sat in the street (which he could now feel was grimy and cold) perplexed by the grip on his arm, unhappy that all of his bodily focus seemed to have centered right there, under the skin, turning around, trying to sort out by some chemical process if this was an attack or not.

“Let’s get you something good,” Seifer said, and then the telltale skittering glow and scent like a vernal, grassy field told him magic was happening. He tried to wrench back in protest, because no way in hell was Almasy going to heal him. He wasn’t healing him, though; Squall suddenly felt cold. His arm shivered and the air flashed blue. 

“Don’t you need—”

“I never cast Blizzara, man, when would I use it,” Seifer told him. As he spoke, the feeling like cutting, icy wind continued to flow down his arm, to the point he wasn’t really counting how many Seifer had given him. They seemed to be going right to a place that was hungry, like a metaphysical organ had been squeezing and grumbling for them. He felt steadier, with that core of ice, like he had finally got something to eat.

“Where'd you get all of…”

“Maybe they’re all the ones you’ve slugged at me.”

“Not how it works.”

“Look who’s so smart,” Seifer told him, with a familiar insulting tone. So familiar that the bite had gone out of it long ago. “Alright, now let’s get you…” he trailed off, but the pressure on his arm increased, like something very real was jittering down his radius, between blood vessels. It flashed white, black, and green, went iridescent, confused him. He called them for a brief period; aero, ultima, bio—but then Seifer seemed to just—hit him with it, like he opened the door, now, and could shove whatever he liked in. For a brief moment, a flash of light and power lit up his face, hollowing the air around them. 

Then it came surging back in, and Seifer was shaking his own arm with a curse. Squall was actually watching the glow die down on his skin. That was….

“No,” he told Seifer, flat, petulant. 

“Too late,” he informed him, giving his fingers one last shake. “Ouch. Not so many at once. Got it.” 

“I’m not taking that much from you,” Squall told him flatly. He made the first exploratory motions of getting onto his own feet, and it did feel easier than it did a second ago.  

“Yeah, too late,” Seifer repeated, even more stubbornly. “Maybe don’t go in with so few next time.”

“Why did you have so many?” 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, a sentiment he expressed to Squall so often that it came out like a snatch of a familiar song, with its own little cadence. 

Squall put the palm of his hand on the ground. He didn’t know if it was just his imagination, but after what had just happened, it felt sensitive, and awake, distinguishing each of the wet fragments of gravel and wind-blows silt that he crunched under his palm. His shoulders and thighs protested when he hoisted himself up, but he didn’t drop back down. His head did sway for a second, like his vision was being reloaded. When he could see again, the first thing he saw was the palm of Seifer’s hand over his eyes. 

He naturally flinched back. Something felt odd in him, a sort of animal fear, a flash-fire. It put him on edge. Seifer pulled back a few inches when Squall flinched, his fingers curling back like a cat putting up their claws. “Lemme check your head, man.”

He wasn’t going to not do it. But he waited until Squall hissed out an embarrassing nervous sigh, trying to shush the fear that sprang up inside him. 

(He was so fucking ashamed of being afraid of him. They had been rivals/partners for so long. But Squall was so ashamed and afraid of being worse than him, still not measuring up to him, after all these years. It made him afraid when Seifer came for him; of failing, of not being worthwhile, again. He thought that he lost a fight as often as he won one, these days. He obsessively analyzed the results. By the numbers, they were probably about even. But no amount of analysis made him unashamed.)

Seifer’s hand was in his hair. When he rolled it back behind his head, the strands shifted and parted. They fell back with tingling prickles, which made his arms tense and his jaw clench. The skin under Seifer’s palm did hurt, but not so bad. 

“‘S that feel?”

“...”

“Does it hurt?” 

Seifer’s palm was clutched around the back of his head, firm enough to keep him in place. “Not much.”

“Doesn’t feel too bad off either, so you should be fine.”

“Did I drop?” Well, he knew he had passed out, but he didn’t recall hitting the ground. But he must have, if Seifer had had to pick him up (fuck) and carry him out (how could he fuck up like this). 

“Sort of,” Seifer snorted, and though Squall had closed his eyes (which he didn’t recall doing) he could see the smirk creeping up one side of his face. “When your lights shut off, you collapsed onto a rebel with your fucking sword out, so, good job there.”

Squall Leonhart, he works in his sleep. He did feel fractionally comforted that someone had really regretted getting the upper hand on him. “The hell are you checking for, then?”

“Look, I don’t how how brain medicine works, but I do know they check your skull whenever you pass out,” said Seifer, hopefully meaning the general ‘you,’ maybe meaning ‘you, you dumb son of a fuck.’ 

“Well…” said Squall, and got stuck on the next thing to say. Well, stop? Well, get on with it, then? Well, why the hell is it still there?

Seifer wasn’t doing anything with his hand, necessarily. It was still holding the back of his head, curled slightly into his hair. He was wearing gloves, obviously, so he knew the touch was probably silty, maybe oily, maybe even bloody; still, he figured he hadn’t been any cleaner himself.

“Hey,” said Seifer, with something unknown in his voice. 

Any unknown made Squall’s guts kind of twist in uncomfortable anticipation. This one made them just freeze where they were. Like the whole body sucking a breath in. He slitted open his eyes to look at Seifer, who still wasn’t doing anything of note.

“What?” he could hear the fearful prickle in his voice and he was really hoping Seifer couldn’t.

“...Does this seem off to you?”

“...What?”

Seifer’s eyes cast a shadowed glace quickly at the way they had come. “I don’t get what the hell that was, or why it was in a basement in Deling City itself… what I want to know is why we keep getting ordered to huge busts, from mysterious tip-offs, and they all happen to be in heavily populated places, with lots of witnesses, though no one had ever seen a thing before we got here.”

...Huh? “...I… don’t know…” muttered Squall, struggling to even understand the question. “The… the dissent groups are based largely in urban populations… so…”

“Sure,” Seifer (who wasn’t moving his hand, and maybe had forgotten it was even there) sighed, “but how… how are we getting tipped off, exactly the second that things seem to be coming to a head, every time the rebels choose a new cellar or old bar to gather in? How do we get told to bust doors exactly the second everyone’s there, in the middle of something?”

“Police spies,” Squall figured. “Deling’s system is pretty strong.”

“I mean, yes?” Seifer admitted, his brow furrowing in frustration as he looked away, down the street. “But it doesn’t feel… it doesn’t feel right. Every bust is identical. The people inside are confused, alarmed, and they typically suck at defending themselves. If they’re so well-organized to have so many sects, if those sects have so much firepower, why are they so badly organized that they get found out so fast and go down so fast when uncovered?”

Squall had literally never thought about it. “They’re… rarely that powerful…” he struggled, using the question to answer the question. “They thrive off secrecy, and typically move underground so…”

“But the real question is,” continued Seifer, who was so wrapped up in his thoughts he was tapping one finger to the base of Squall’s skull, down where it met the spin, and causing his skin to flinch every time. “...Why do we have to bust them? Since it’s so easy, why not have the police, or the troops do it? Why call on us, every time? Are these people scattered and weak, or are they organized, powerful, and pervasive? How can they be both?” 

“...I…”

“Don’t you wonder about it?” asked Seifer, suddenly looking back, with a wideness in his blue eyes. “I can‘t stop thinking about it.”

Squall found himself forced to think about how Seifer had been doing recently. 

It wasn’t pretty. 

It wasn’t considered wrong for Seifer to make his opinions about the conflict known. He was expected to keep it inside Garden, obviously. But he… there was a level of…

It wasn’t really about making his opinions known. Seifer had already let everybody who would listen know that he thought they were fighting for an immoral despot, and that they were sacrificing too much for him. He had made his opinions about the amount of corpses he had carried out of city streets clear. That much was fine, but it wasn’t about making a reasoned argument anymore. It seemed to be about the fact that Seifer now couldn’t think about anything else. He could only think about that immoral despot, towering over his mind from his office in Deling. He could only think about those bodies carried out of the streets, one after another, a hard afternoon’s work that carried on, and on, into the evening, the night, the morning, and on and on again, even though his hands should have been emptied. Seifer couldn’t keep it to Garden anymore, he couldn’t keep it to himself, and he couldn’t keep it inside. He couldn’t be distracted even when it was just the two of them, trying to unwind, even to grab a drink like they were two normal people with a normal partnership (which is the level of desperation Squall had gone to with him). He didn’t see Squall in front of him; he saw the fight, the unending one, at all times. He saw the blood-splattered street, and his anger over it never ended. And being pushed out of his place as Seifer’s enemy, Squall was—  

He was—

The uncanny vulnerability in his eyes, how it seemed to just seep out, like blood, from a crack deep in, made Squall shudder with a fear that he couldn’t place, or even fully feel. It was a crawling sort of fear, that came out of somewhere dark, somewhere that had been piled up with dirt already. It was something complicated, seizing several organs at once, that told him that this could not be. Seifer could not be vulnerable, afraid, and wondering why they had killed so many people. That would be unbearable. Squall couldn’t handle that. 

“No, I don’t,” said Squall.

“Damn, you don’t even think about—”

“ No, I don’t, ” Squall insisted. 

“Something isn’t how it looks,” Seifer said to him, low, grinding on, like a train. “Something isn’t the way we’ve been told and civilians are dying as we—”

Squall thought about Seifer pounding at the headmaster’s door, demanding to be heard. He thought about him slumped half-dead over a glass of something strong, looking like a man he no longer knew. And he did not think about but felt Seifer letting him know that Squall had better become a tough enough bastard to stand up to him. To face him off. “Stop it,” Squall told him.

And Seifer did stop, like that. For a man who preferred to rail on for an hour undisturbed, and would continue railing on if you shut the door in his face, it was fucking eerie. His voice cut out, he looked Squall in the eyes, and he didn’t say anything. Like he was waiting for something.

...For what? What could…

“Stop going on about this,” Squall heard himself say, beyond the blood that had started pounding in his ears. Steady, panicked. “What does it matter? People want each other to die here, and… people are trying to die and we’re just…” His blood was pounding, and there was a hand in his hair. “We’re just getting it over with.”

He had his eyes closed again. His head started heating up, all though, a burn that spread from where that hand was perched on his skull. Seifer didn’t say anything; his fingers clutched a little tighter. Some seconds passed, with Squall’s eyes shut, the fluctuation of blood, roaring in his ears, and his skin prickling. 

He couldn’t see, but could feel Seifer getting closer. He was stuck like he was rooted into the street all through it. 

Warm skin pressed to his forehead, and stayed. The gesture was so smooth, understated, that it didn’t register with Squall at first. Seifer sighed, and it landed softly on his face. They were pressed together, Seifer’s forehead resting on his, as he held him loosely on the back of his head. 

Seifer took in a breath, and Squall waited for what he would say. He didn’t say anything. He let the breath back out, and it too fell on his lips, the bridge of his nose. His hand wove into his hair, and Seifer breathed again, and twice more, while blood coarsed like the thudding of ocean waves around Squall’s head. Seifer, who was probably two days without sleep, was shaking a little; his forehead was rolling so gently against Squall’s it was barely noticeable, but for where the skin warmed where it touched and cooled where it was let go. 

It seeped into him, a system of heat that spread all around. It felt like something that had happened already, and it felt like something that wasn't supposed to happen.

“Okay,” Seifer said. The word was tactile, because it was so close. “We’ve got this. We’re gonna be okay.”

Squall felt like it was time to open his eyes, and yet, he couldn’t. “Should be getting—”

“Hold on,” said Seifer, again, pulling him back, again. He lifted his forehead away, and the air seemed to breathe cold on Squall as he left. “You sure you’re fine to—”

“I would like nothing more than to get this over with,” said Squall, shortly, but quiet. The hand on his head, the stillness it imposed on him; he wanted to keep it. A sense of security was sneaking up on him, like the warmth in his skin was melting the discomfort away. It was bad, and it was so rare to feel comfortable like this that he didn’t have an automatic defense trigger against it anymore. He couldn’t remember…

Seifer kind of laughed, a surprised, uncomfortable laugh. “Man, you…” Squall couldn’t really tell what he was meaning to get across. Whatever it was, it was mostly expressed through a familiar, presumptive squeeze of his hand on the back of Squall’s head, gentle, firm, drawing the locks of his hair through his fingers, and coming back. He called it familiar, but he couldn’t recall Seifer ever doing such a thing before. And yet it was familiar, as if such a thing was common between them. Completely normal, in sync, out of place, it had Squall, in a moment of dizzy intensity, reinterpreting every touch that had come before it, every over quick flick to his cheek, every other hand woven into his hair. It had him reordering them, putting them together in another way, and wondering if he had seen the wrong picture the entire time. Could everything else have felt this way? Was it supposed to? 

“What about me?” he asked, finally opening his eyes. 

Seifer was looking at him with an absolutely undefined expression. His eyes were tight and had hurt in them; they were bright. And there was something so warm, overall, encompassing. His cheeks had flushed and he was focused on him. 

“You,” said Seifer, again, definitively, an insult and a term of endearment. “Look,” he said, glancing with a softer look and a tempered reluctance down the street. “We’ve—damn,” he interrupted himself, clearly torn between other matters and where he was, here, with a hand on Squall’s head. 

“What?” asked Squall, a little more forcefully. 

Seifer squeezed him one more time, and finally, the hand lifted away and returned to Seifer’s side. Squall’s skull immediately prickled with the absence of it. Still, Seifer was very close to him. He hadn’t seen any reason to move away. “You’re gonna be okay,” said Seifer, with more solid conviction. “We’re gonna get through this. Look, I’ve got a hunch.” He looked the opposite way down the road. 

“A hunch.”

“There’s something I have to check on,” Seifer continued vaguely, his brow furrowing. “I still think something is shifty and I want to get to the bottom of it.”

He wasn’t going to let it go. But did he let anything go? “Fine.” It was fine, if he just wanted to get information about the rebel factions and their movements. 

“I think you should make sure we get the target,” Seifer said, meaning whatever was in that cellar, “and I’m going to head out and check up on this.”

Squall felt uneasy. Forget the fact that they weren’t supposed to split up (but when did Seifer give a shit about orders), this just didn’t seem like the right time to split up. There were too many combatants on the streets after a year of escalating violence. Too many gears were turning. Something that was different, unexpected, unplanned for, was rising out of its hiding place. And things were changing, here, now, in a palace Squall didn’t want to be. “Where?”

“Just let me do this,” he said, meaning, ‘I’m doing this.’ Though he didn’t say it with any annoyance or condensendance. He seemed to be trying to convince an outside force. “Just let me do this, get a few answers, and we’ll meet back up at Garden.” 

“...Okay,” said Squall. “Have you—”

“Look—”

“Have you got back-up?”

“Of course I’ve got back-up,” Seifer scoffed. Sure, Squall figured his fucking gang was around here somewhere. “Look, Squall,”

“Then we’d both better go fast.”

Seifer frowned with annoyance down the street. No matter how he liked it, it was true. The battle was being fought now. “Alright, alright,” he growled, not at Squall, but at everything else. At the violence and the factions and the forces and the stupid bad timing keeping them from having a minute of peace. He turned to Squall, and he looked more normal, he looked like himself. Harried, annoyed in general, like he knew he was running out of time. 

Squall nodded at him. He half turned away, to get back into the fighting before he could think about it. Seifer lifted his hand again, and it made Squall stop. The pangs of nervousness did not go away. They also asked, suddenly. This shivering weakness inside asked for him to stop, with a little white core of hope in the center of their hot nervousness. 

Seifer did touch his cheek again, just as he thought he would. Glancing, and brief. 

He didn’t know why that felt like it had always been happening, when it had never been happening. He didn’t know if he was seeing things new, or imagining things. 

“Hold on,” said Seifer, one more time. It meant don’t fucking die, and it meant he’d be right back.

“Sure,” said Squall.

—

And that was it. He turned away, and that was it. He heard Seifer’s clunking footfalls running in the opposite direction, and that was it. He went back to the cellar and he found something terrible, and that was it. 

He never saw him again. That was it. He didn’t come back that night, or the next morning, or the next afternoon, and when they were both supposed to be back in Timber to look over a divisive strike on a rebel base they had located (he had located) just the night before, Seifer wasn’t at his post. People had seen him. People said they thought he had just been here. People had been seeing him in Timber all night, just in the back, just behind them, like a ghost. 

And then the bombing was botched. It had been eight years since, and no one had untangled who, how, or why, or what this could possibly mean. It was a singular catastrophe. It was an embarrassment like Garden hadn’t seen since. 

They meant to bomb a single outlying neighborhood with a huge rebel faction. Through a mixed-up mess of computing, orders, confusion, delays, they bombed Timber downtown. The press of people, the highest buildings. It folded. From above, it looked like a table full of food collapsing. Everything slid to the center and the plates broke with a horrible clatter. The death toll was in the thousands. There was a hole in the ground where the lights glittering on the streets should have been. And they still didn’t have proof in Garden of whether it had been a computational error, or sabotage, or a terrible mistake, because the misfiring that had sent bomb after bomb after fucking bomb on the civilians as they watched metled the computers in the old system and left them without even a flaw to point to. It just happened, they were all gone, and the death toll was in the thousands, and that was it. 

—

(“Hold on.”)

He and Quistis both helped in the private funeral for specifically SeeDs that had gone missing, presumed dead. Hell, they had had to write the list, since so few people had their finger on who was where at any given time. The disorganization was a consequence of forcibly ousting Kramer rather than waiting for him to retire, but it had been necessary. 

Hw could only imagine what was going through Xu’s head as she stood there, in a prim black dress. She had only wrested power from the old guard a few months before. 

He could only imagine what Selphie thought, with silent tears streaming down her face. No one knew why she and Seifer had started to grow close as the war ground to its secret, surprise finale. She had seen something in him she thought she could fix, Squall had assumed at the time.

He could only imagine what he thought himself. It was like some other hand was holding his thoughts in a faraway grasp, as he was left with thudding silence.

He remembers he had to rely on Shiva to tell him when and where to walk.

—

He knows he was inexplicably there for the deliberation and signing of the peace treaties. It seemed his reserve, his calm, and his neutral stance were of great value. Very refreshing. So nice to see someone with a cool head in a time like this. 

—

Did he know, he asked Shiva miserably. Was he trying to convince me to come with him? Did he know about the bombs? Did he do it?

I wonder, she answered, cooly, what we will learn when we examine—

Was he trying to convince me to come with him? Did he think he was going to die? Was he with the rebels already? Did he know about the fucking bombs? Do you think he was in on it? Do you think he did it? 

Squall, if you look closely and examine—

Did he know it was going to happen? Was he part of it all along? Was he trying to say goodbye to me? 

Squall…

Didn’t he say he was going to come back? Wasn’t he trying to say he’d come back? Didn’t he say to hold on? Doesn’t that mean he was coming right back? Did he think he was coming right back?

What we know about his actions—

Did he mean to fucking drop a bomb on me, was he trying to say goodbye to me, was he trying to take me with him? Did he mean to fucking drop a bomb on me, was he trying to say goodbye to me, was he trying to take me with him, was he trying to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen? Was he trying to convert me, did he think that I’d go with them, was he baiting me into a fucking set-up? Was he trying to frame me? Was he trying to say goodbye to me, was he trying to take me with him, was he trying to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen, did he know, or did he just suspect, did he know all along, or was he being used, what the hell did he fucking mean, ‘hold on,’

You won’t get anywhere if you—

What the hell did he mean, ‘hold on,’ what the hell did that mean, what the hell did he mean, what was he trying to say to me, was he trying to take me with him, did he already do it, did he already do it, did he already mean to do it,

—

Original Note:

Close your eyes and see the sky is falling/ Close your eyes and see the sky is falling

Ugh YES I have loved this chapter since I wrote it and I finally have it edited enough despite everything I have going on to share it YES, YES. I obsessed over every other sentence in this thing plz enjoy the breakdown of Squall's mental state

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Oh, shit, target sighted, fuck

He couldn’t bend his neck to look down for more than thirty seconds without it pounding, there was such a fucking kink in it. A persistent, nagging fatigue made his fine motor skills slow. His guts weren’t honestly that much happier than they were last night; they were at latest more like a sleeping pit of snakes than a writing, hissing one. He had been giving them sips of coffee whenever they were being good. A half-full cup of it (black) teetered almost on the edge of the table, far away from his project. 

There was company at the table, a situation that Squall was cautiously neutral about. Irvine had come in and sat down after the barest of socializing. Initially, he had probably been wondering what was up with Squall shoving the beds in the little cabin vertically against the wall and dragging a folding table and a chair inside to tax the cramped space. Irvine had looked, gone back out, and then come back with his own chair and his own drink (probably also coffee, but one can never be sure). He was holding his mug, gently steaming, one leg propped up on the other, as he leaned back and watched.

The table, despite being large, was now mostly covered with a mechanical vivisection. There were carefully balanced bolts and screws, set up on their ends, inches apart from each other and perfectly even, as if balanced on an invisible grid. Long spikes and tubes and curls of metal, hair-thin, each balanced precipitously in their own unmarked subsection. Bolts and bullets carefully side by side. In Squall’s hands was everything he hadn’t taken apart yet, including the long, thin blade, which he rotated minutely as he carefully tested each hinge by each catch, taking Hyperion apart. 

It was even more complicated than it had looked from the outside. It was the Blade of Theseus, that’s for sure; he would be lying to you if he said he knew for such which parts were once in the original, except for the blade itself. In a few pieces on the inside he found carved maker’s marks, minuscule, almost invisible, none recognizable. Seifer’s contacts, not his. He mentally filed their curves and characters. For the most part, he saw unmarked, unlabeled, custom parts, their function not apparent but revealed when put together, like the wires, pistons, and springs of a pocketwatch. 

“How’s this trigger go on?” was the first thing Irvine actually said to him, after a pretty uncharacteristic length of silence. And it was a fair question, since it had taken Squall some time and attention to pry it off. 

“Like this,” Squall told him, low and cautious, because if Irvine was just going to talk on the level of guns, he’d talk back. But he was prime-grade unwilling to have a conversation-conversation today. “There’s an extra catch on the—”

“Huh,” said Irvine, watching Squall spin some pieces around to show how they fit in together, them practically glittering as they circled in his eyes. “Good safety.”

It was. “Thorough. Wouldn't be easy to shoot accidentally.” 

“You’d have to break it to do it,” Irvine examined, leaning in but keeping his hands clenched around his cup. “Wouldn’t get more than one shot if you didn’t know how to handle it.” 

Squall thought about it, and nodded. The safety catch was complicated enough you’d have to force it if you couldn’t reason it, which would make Hyperion much less useful real fast. He had operated it yesterday almost without thinking about it, which said something, that’s for sure. Something that someone using their brain might think. As it stood that morning, his brain was 100% to be used for mechanical engineering. “You have to feel for it when it’s on.”

“That’s the level of customization I’m talking about,” Irvine muttered, and it honestly was something he talked about a lot. Squall could probably recite you his little rant. “It’s yours or it ain’t.”

“Hm,” said Squall, who was about seven-eighths of the way through wheeling the barrel off of the blade. They were separable. It was not easy. The screws had admirably tight bolts that were pretty well accustomed to being on their favored threads. Still, he could tell some were a few months old, some a few years; they got replaced often enough that none had fused or gone brittle. 

“Precision,” Irvine said with a squint, bringing his cup up to his face but not quite drinking. “Valuing precision over force, I think.”

“I think,” Squall echoed, since he was a little too surly at the moment to say ‘I think he’s valuing both.’ ‘He had picked precision,’ as if he had been forced to choose. Seifer had done both, well. “It’s in progress, anyway.”

“What? Oh, yeah,” Irvine continued, answering his own questions. “For sure. I don’t think I see a part under a few years old.”

“Couple.”

“Yeah, the blade is original—”

“A lot of the chamber was modified, not replaced.”

“Forearm, classic. But those barrels, super new.”

“Yeah.” 

“Squall, how many people make these?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, a little testy, even to his own ears. He had almost gotten into a rhythm of speaking to a person, normally, for five seconds. Now there were questions again. He tried to keep his thoughts in the barrel of the gun, looking deep inside for hidden trips and catches.

“These hybrid weapons.”

“Not a clue,” he admitted. “It’s not regulated. There’s no official gunblade manufacturer. There are a handful of big names, but they tend to toe the line with the law.”

“You telling me these gunblades attract shifty types?”

“I’m telling you they tend to violate safety protocols. Regular consumer lawsuits discourage a craftsman eventually.” 

“Hm,” Irvine repeated, smiling for a second.. “Need to bother her into letting me look through some old incident reports again.”

‘Her’ would be Selphie. “Why?”

“So I can figure out how many ‘murder weapon: unknown’s were actually Hyperion,” he said, with a tap of one finger on the ceramic rim of his mug. “I wouldn’t’ve recognized a shot from this thing if I hadn’t known it had gotten like this.”

That was an unpleasant thought. “Might solve a few cold cases.”

“Dunno about ‘solve,’ but put them in the right category for sure,” Irvine said, finally taking a slow drink. “Like, it would be interesting to see if a couple of ‘probable political assassination’s or ‘cause unknown’s were related to this group all along. Unless—” he cut himself off, looking off to think about some things Squall didn’t want to know about.

Could Seifer have been skulking around Deling City all this time? Slipping in and out, taking heads, building a power base, avoiding Garden’s trajectory? Squall didn’t reply. He focused his mental energy on unwinding another bolt from its threads. A couple dozen minute turns, 120 degrees at a time. One, two, three, to slip it evenly down the screw. And then he’d put it right next to the last one he did, the next down the line.

“Thing’s got about twice as many pieces as a shotgun of its size has,” Irvine muttered, coming out of his considerations.

“It’s complicated,” Squall agreed. 

“Seems it would be a detriment to have so many little parts when the whole is so heavy.”

“...It’s light,” said Squall, still feeling like there was something to that, but he didn’t know what. “It feels like two thirds of Punishment's weight. Maybe less.”

“...It’s not any smaller.”

“It’s—” Squall thought about it. “It’s longer—I don’t think it is any bigger.” They couldn't be that different in overall mass. 

“I can tell he made the blade a lot smaller—”

“Yeah…” Either reforged totally or seriously ground down. He could tell it was the original, but he suddenly wondered why he was so sure it was that blade which had cut him, holding it in his hands. “Yeah, it’s way lighter.” 

Why, though? It was obviously useful to not have a gunblade too heavy, to be able to side or shoulder carry it easier, but Seifer had really gone out of his way to shave down just about everything. 

“Still steel?”

“Yeah, good stuff,” Squall said. Irvine had been polite enough not to touch anything, and Squall wasn’t going to tell him he could. Squall carefully slipped a drip of oil under a strut to loosen it. “Some variance.”

“Obviously. It looks like he made it out of the corpses of about fifty different rifles.”

“Looks like,” Squall said. “You think it is?”

“What?” 

“Trophy hunting?”

“Like? Out of the guns of his victims? Shit, I fucking hope not,” said Irvine, but with a kind of reverence that implied ‘it would be very cool, though.’ “You think we’re at. Like. That level of psychopath?”

That wasn’t a question about the gun. That was a question about the owner. He didn’t want to talk about that. Squall made a noise, but any further response stuck on the top of his tongue. He slipped a thin but stubborn band of metal off of the barrel with undue force and a bit of oil splattered on the table. 

“...Probably not,” Irvine answered himself, though his reasoning was his own. “It’s been in constant use, it needs a lot of upgrading. Especially since he seems to be trying to create his own variety of gun here.”

He was, but what was the goal? It was a chimera object—this piece like a rifle, this piece like an automatic, this part, the other—and all of it pinched to a precise point that led hell-knows-where. Squall didn’t get it. It was just a gun, and he didn’t get it. Irvine, hands to himself, hadn’t come up with anything either. He watched Squall dissect the rest of it, get the final little thread and clamp off of the blade, and lay it, tang bare and brilliant silver, on the edge of the table.

It covered the whole surface. Squall had carefully displayed every piece, every scrap, each facet in a glistening array, wafting their unique scent of oil, smoke, niter, and a little tingling glitter of magic. Its foreign stamps and signs were scattered like an oracle. If he hadn’t gotten his nails into it already, he might not know which piece belonged to which. He might not have guessed it was all part of the same amalgamate thing. He could have called it malformed, chaotic, a mistake. No way would all that work together. 

That’s the beauty of a good cover, he thought, but it was hollow, it didn’t quite cover it. 

Irvine drank his (maybe) coffee and Squall didn’t. His eyes travelled to each piece, one by one, and catalogued them, made a map for them. He already knew the finished piece, and yet, something in the process was so large, so uncharted, that between the start and the finish he didn’t go anywhere. It was if there was an extra, unknown step in the process, like he misunderstood something about the act of putting it together, like there was a gap in between instigation and creation. But he didn’t have a gap of knowledge about building fucking guns. He knew how it fucking went. 

“How’d you nab it?”

“Watched his bedroom.”

“You what?”

Squall’s eyes momentarily shut. “I got into the… hard to explain. The ducts of the place after I broke out of my cell. Places in the walls. I was monitoring his room for a while.”

“...Right on,” said Irvine, who wasn’t much of an infiltrator himself. ...Well, alright, not much of a stealth infiltrator. He was good for a charmed entrance, something which no one had even asked Squall to do, ever. “Selphie did say she found you in the ceiling.”

“She did, with a magic detector.”

“How the hell no one else detected you, then, if you were in there for… what did you say?”

“The prison, over two weeks, the walls, a few days, I’m not sure,” he recited. “Magic’s dead in there. That helped.”

“Uh huh, some kind of nullifier?”

“Strong,” Squall told him, trying to put enough weight into the word for emphasis. “It’s supposed to keep the sorceress in check while she’s in the place.”

“Damn. That’s gotta be some hardware.”

“I never saw it—” Huh? He had gone up and down the whole of the prison. He had been in the walls for days. How had he never seen where the magic nullifier was? What was it, in the bedrock of the whole place? Underground? Why hadn’t he looked for it? “I just—I just know it works.”

“Selphie said—”

“I know what Selphie told you and I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how she was using her Guardian. I could hardly talk to mine. They were… repelled. By the whole thing. Her, it.” 

“A’ight,” said Irvine, a very particular, practiced acquiescence of the argument. Squall gave him a good look for the first time that morning; a little ruffled, a little sleepless. Bruises on his neckline above his unbuttoned shirt; he couldn’t tell how recent they were and didn’t care to. “Brother, that’s way out of my department. Forget I even asked.”

Squall shrugged, trying to let some tension out with it. It was obvious neither of them had slept much. And there wasn't any reason to fight with Irvine anyway. He didn’t hardly fight back. It wasn’t his way. He had slippery, soft conversations, not too consequential, with the points drifting all around like bits on the tide, going nowhere fast. Squall felt stupid and pointless when he tried to pick a fight with Irvine, like he was fighting something inanimate. The point of talking with Irvine wasn’t to win.

It could be nice, sometimes. 

“He did shoot you,” Irvine stated. 

Squall felt the tension in him flare right back up and really tried to just bite it back down.

“The hole in your shoulder came outta this,” Irvine said, rapping his knuckles on the underside of the table, so gently that only the tiniest pieces of the gun rattled. “And I don’t know who took the bullet out, but they didn’t do great.”

“Field surgeon. He doped me up, so I barely remember. How can you tell?” He honestly wasn’t sure Irvine had even seen the entry wound. Maybe he had been more disheveled before he retired last night than he realized. 

“Well, I could tell you got shot by how you’re favoring the other arm, and first off, I figured it wasn’t by any fool,” he started, giving Squall some unrealistic credit by assuming that a grunt with good luck couldn’t shoot him just as well as his equals. “Second, you’re treating it like it shot you.”

“How am I treating a gun like it shot me.”

Irvine pointedly glanced at the table.

“I want to know how it works.”

“You don’t need every screw for that, man.” 

“I want to know where he got the pieces.”

“I’ll be glad to write it down on a case file, but you don’t have one in front of you. It’s just you and the gun.”

It sure was supposed to be. “He shot me, I took it apart, it’s not a big deal.”

“He did shoot you though?”

“Yeah, from a story or two above.”

“Straight down? Squall. You could’ve been dead.”

“Yeah.” Obviously. We play with guns, Irvine.

“Glad to know he’s not a superhuman shot, yet. Or did he spare you?”

“...” 

“Wait, he shot at you trying to escape? Or when—”

“He didn’t know it was me yet,” Squall said, each word heavier than the last. It made him shudder, something he tried to keep in between his shoulder blades. “He wanted me to know that. That he shot before he knew it was me.”

“Huh,” said Irvine, an uncertainty in his tone, one that made him lean slightly on the back two legs of his chair. “And then he pulled fire?”

“...Yes.” 

He had given consideration to what Seifer had said. He had given so much weight to his words they were pressing him down. Seifer had stopped firing after he hit Squall in the shoulder, he was sure. It had been the last shot he took at him, so far. Despite Squall—well—

“Okay,” said Irvine, still with his thinking-thoughts, don’t-mind-me, just-thinking-out-loud, nothin’-too-serious voice on. “So I’m hearing you were being full-stops kept alive.” 

Granted. “Seems so.”

“Medical treatment, food, sounds like a pretty light hand.”

“Seems so.”

“Did he… like… he had some plans for you.”

Or else why would he be alive? Even Irvine wasn’t pretending to be that dumb. “He kept trying to negotiate Garden’s removal from the conflict.” 

“That’s…” Irvine visibly rifled through several stupid things he could say. “Weird, Brother,” he said, addressing his words to the shut window. “That’s weird, man. You know we don’t operate from… like, you got certified, you whackjob, you were an active SeeD, we don’t operate from prison. We don’t negotiate at a disadvantage. You weren’t gonna get shit out of him. It’s the basic playbook.”

Oh, Stars, someone who understood him, and it had to be Irvine Kinneas. “I told him that. At some point he claimed he was just keeping me from reporting back.”

“Think he was?”

“No, because he kept trying to negotiate. Irvine, it’s—” And it was like someone else bit down on his tongue to keep him from talking. A rush of adrenaline rose and clamped his jaw. He huffed in frustration. It’s not coming together. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what he wants, and he’s got a transparent, chaotic, messy mind like it’s already been blown to bits and I’m seeing into his skull. It’s like watching a washing machine spin. He runs his mouth and he’s uncomfortably fucking open and honest. All full disclosure, all the time. I don’t have to analyze shit but I’ve got nothing. I got all the pieces and I don’t know how it goes together. 

Irvine had watched him, quietly, for some awful seconds, as he felt like a mess inside. “It’s weird,” Irvine repeated, little shells of words, wrapped around a whole lot of ammunition he was thinking of saying. Squall could just feel the clicking. “It’s not like he wasn’t trained the same way as us, but he’s just forgot what we will or won’t do? I guess it’s been a good long time,”

“Irvine—he’s—a—mess.”

“Right rich and powerful mess,” said Irvine, inquisitively, calmly, transparently slipping in a knife to crack this nut open a little wider. Squall could feel it and he hated it but it was fucking Irvine, who just rolled over when you snapped at him. I mean, he couldn’t just tell Irvine to shut his fucking prying mouth.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s gone to shit but he’s got it all together but I don’t get it,” Squall tried to say. “It’s a mess in there. It’s. It’s a big goddamn mess. No one’s running anything. And it’s going great.”

“Yeah, they’re—they’re making a big mess of the continent.”

“It’s just spreading.”

“A right big mess, and I’m not sure I understand how,” said Irvine, drumming his fingers, purposefully not looking at Squall. 

“They’ve got a split personality in an unbalanced power relationship at the helm, no chain of command, just bargains, favors, debts, no documents, no archive or I wouldn’t have found it, I still don’t know—”

“No, it’s not a formal system, can’t be a very formal system or how would they keep their mercs in line? For that matter, how do they keep—”

“Exactly, people just run around doing whatever the hell they want to do, and despite Deling having all the cards, all the man power, all the clout, it’s just going fucking great for them!”

“And half the time it feels like Deling’s just folding,” said Irvine, with a distracted smack of his palm on the table, “I don’t understand the orders we’re--”

“Hey,” Squall snapped, halfway getting up to stand, because Irvine’s slap on the table had rattled the delicate pieces of the weapon spread out on it. 

“Shit, sorry—” Irvine snapped to reality and quickly leaned back. His drink sloshed in his cup as he lifted his hands. 

“Keep your hands to yourself. A fucking mite of dust in this thing and it might stop working,” Squall grumbled, turning his whole attention back to Hyperion. The sunlight had started to spread as the sun rose; new angles of the bolts and chambers were glittering as it shifted. The new angles didn’t tell him any more about the stupid, beautiful thing—just more facets that went together into an incomprehensible whole. 

And the pieces were so delicate—hell, maybe a bit of dust could make it catch. Or make one of those tiny little shards of metal burst into—

“Fire,” said Squall. 

“Huh?” 

“Help me put this back together.”

“What.”

“Just put together the barrel, you’ll get it, I’ll do the important stuff,” Squall mumbled, already picking up bolts. “Be fucking careful, oil everything—not that part—not—whatever, I’ll tell you, you’ll get it.”

“Yeah, it’s, it’s complicated, I’m a specialist—” Irvine was still holding his hands back, like he was afraid Squall was going to break his fingers if he actually extended them. (Well, if he broke the gun, maybe.) “Squall, what.”

“Just get it together. We’ve got to take this out back.”

—

Not that ‘out back’ wasn’t ‘everywhere’ out here. Squall had cooled down a little in the time it took them to put it back together—he couldn’t keep the frenetic pace he started with, not when he started getting nervous about getting the replacement order right—and Irvine had spent the whole time in near silence, eyes going back and forth between him and the gun as it went together in their hands, even as he tightened screws and tested alignment.  

‘Out back’ was going to be under the waterfall, where the spray misted his face and landed in droplets on polished metal, just in case. The sun was up now, and as was everyone else in the camp, but no one had followed them behind the gusting mist. 

“Hyperion,” Squall pronounced, all caffeine, no patience, “is a channel.”

“Okay,” said Irvine. 

“Every gun is a channel,” Squall said, lifting Hyperion up to his face, looking through the little hair’s-width sight, and lowering it again. He didn’t want to get too impatient. “The design of a gun is not to be a weapon itself, but the weapon’s medium. It’s a hollow place through which as much force as possible shoots through, as fast as possible.”

“Yes,” said Irvine, who was a career sniper, and didn’t need to hear all this, but knew a man slightly splitting from reality when he saw one. As did Squall, but he hadn’t chosen his level of lucidity for a good while now.

“The bullet is the weapon. The gun is a channel, doing as much as possible to allow force,” he said, picking at the chamber, testing the outside with a calloused pointer finger, doing about his fifth check that everything had been put together right. “Which Seifer knows. Very well. Hyperion is the opposite of a weapon. It has been hollowed out, whittled down, to be the channel of a weapon as much as possible.

“Hyperion is designed to carry magic. He’s got such small pieces. Lightweight. High quality metal, not going to melt or fracture under pressure. Personalized. Of course he pared down the blade, he doesn’t need it. SHE doesn’t need it. It’s not a weapon anymore, it’s a conduit. As much as possible, hollowed out.”

“...For.”

“Fire. Magic. Maybe any kind,” Squall said, his mind racing. He was putting the details together practically after he said them. “Big magic. Rough magic. A space to intensify it, channel it, focus it, and all she has to be able to do is hold it—this is the Sorceress’s gun. That’s why it’s so light. That’s why she knew so much about Punishment. It’s for, it’s—”

He held Hyperion before him and Hyne help him, his hands were trembling with excitement as he reached for Shiva. 

And then sharp gunshots went off, two in a row, and people started screaming. 

Irvine and Squall started and looked at each other, both fully convinced, for two seconds, that the other one had fired for some reason. And after they silently communicated to each other that it wasn’t them, they both split and bolted for the noise, like the well-trained idiots they were. 

It wasn’t chaos up front, but it was trying to be. Late sleepers or people with bagels in one hand and weapons in another were falling out of bed, the affronted panic of the interrupted in their eyes. Selphie was braced behind the truck next to a woman he kind of recognized (a SeeD for sure, but probably only for a few years) with a gun drawn. She was still fumbling her grip on it, and yelling. The windows had been burst out of the truck she was hiding behind but with a quick scan he couldn’t see that either of them were hurt. 

“SQUALL YOU BETTER GET BEHIND SOMETHING—” she started and interrupted herself with a squeak as another bullet cracked dead into one of the cabins behind her, shattering the windows. Selphie whipped her head back around at the source of the bullets, “AND I GODDAMN SWEAR—”

“TELL ME WHERE HE IS,” bellowed you know exactly who. 

Squall went numb as Irvine yanked him back around the corner of a cabin to hide, hoping to evade Seifer’s notice. It was way too late; Seifer had either followed Selphie’s line of sight or seen the slight movement, because the next window to shatter was the one on the front of the cabin that Squall was pressed to. Someone screamed from inside, but it wasn’t an ‘I’m hit’ scream, unless they were just really used to and tired of being hit by bullets.

“GET YOUR GODSFORSAKEN BOOT-LICKING ASS OUT FROM BEHIND THAT SHITTY ARMY-STANDARD RECOOP UNIT TYPE B I SWEAR I WILL BURN THIS WHOLE PLACE TO THE GROUND,” screamed a voice literally from his nightmares, a little higher-pitched than it usually was and ricocheting off the sheer heights of the cliffs like thunder. “GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.”

“I think—MOTHERFUCKER,” Irvine shouted as a quick peek around the edge of the house nearly went badly for him. He clutched his forehead, but Seifer had missed him. Or had been firing warning shots, who knows. “I think he’s alone??”

“Wh—he didn’t— he didn’t just follow us alone, that’s impossible,” Squall hissed out in a horrified rush. 

“I didn’t see—”

“What’s he firing??”

“I think a pistol??” 

Seifer used his sixth bullet to start letting air out of the tires of one of the cars. A quiet noise of a sliding chamber told Squall that he had brought plenty more bullets to share. “He did not cross the desert after a moving vehicle alone with a fucking pistol.”

“I think he might have!!”

“GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.” This shout wasn’t immediately followed up by a shot; there was a pretty tell-tale click of a safety instead. 

“He did not.” Squall repeated to himself, back flat against the cabin wall. There was a little trembling in him, under his breastbone. “Cross the desert. After a motorcycle. Alone. With a fucking pistol. For me.”

“Think he’s mostly interested in—”

“WHERE IS MY GUN, YOU FACIST MOTHERFUCKER.”

“—you know, that,” Irvine concluded weakly.

“He didn’t. How. He’s—” Squall didn’t even know what he was still talking about. His heart thudded a few stupid words out of his mouth. Seifer had to have walked all night, following tracks in the sand; he couldn’t have brought back-up or they would have stopped him from doing something this stupid, and Squall knew he had chased immediately after him because he had been holding nothing but a pistol when he confronted him. He was tired, alone—

He was shooting out the tires of their vehicles with alarming speed. The pressurized bang of another set of hard rubber wheels going up made his hands clench around Hyperion.

“He’s—” Irvine had gotten another quick look while Seifer was focused on destroying their machines. “Definitely a pistol, he’s just a fucking crackshot. Dude, he’s red as a lobster. He looks fucking incandescent, he looks like he’s fucking on fire he’s so fucking mad. I don’t even see a car, Squall—”

One more shot interrupted them, this one at another set of windows. Over the shattering glass, Seifer screamed, “FUCKING GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.”

“Squall, holy shit,” said Irvine, the shock in his voice slowly transforming into a sort of hysterical delight. “Squall, this is the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. Is this?? Is this like?? Is this who he is now??” 

“He’s here,” said Squall, feeling dizzy. 

“Is this just how it’s going to be?? Like??”

“He came back for me.”

“By himself, on foot, through a damn— no no no no man get back—”

Irvine’s plea came way too late. Squall took what could have easily been the last breath of his life, squared his shoulders, and pushed away from the wall. He turned on his heel with Hyperion cocked and ready and Seifer was already staring back at him, pistol raised. 

“This?” asked Squall, his voice like the wind. 

And Seifer didn’t shoot. He had a death grip on the pistol—the same little army-issue handgun he had aimed at him almost a day ago—and he was like fucking stone clutched around it, stock-still with rage. He was red because he was sunburnt to hell and because he looked like he had slipped into the type of mania you need serious chemical alteration to maintain, stalking twenty hours across the open desert.

“YES. FUCKING. THAT. YOU. EVIL LITTLE MOTHERFUCKER.” Every word seemed cast out of his mouth, like he was wholly possessed with rage. His killshot aim right on Squall’s skull didn’t waver an inch. 

“I figured it out,” said Squall, not sure himself what his next words were going to be. “I took the whole thing apart. Piece by piece.”

There was no possible way for Seifer to look angrier. He didn’t even twitch, in fact, not even when Squall took enough slow steps forward to get out from behind the building and into the light of day. “It’s a good machine. Though, it’s not a gun anymore.”

“GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.”

“Absolutely not,” Squall told him, marveling at how light, how beautiful it was as he aimed it at its owner. “I’m never giving it up. Especially not now that I know what it’s for.”

“You can get your FUCKING dirty hands off of it,” Seifer snarled.

Squall felt a horrible kind of unbalanced elation, a feeling he couldn’t even put in its place. Context was a little far on the edges of perception, an emotional, not logical, memory. Everything was quiet and clean in his mind and his vision was a tunnel that ended where his sight did.

“This is for your wife,” he said, “It’s for her magic. Or for you to channel it, I don’t know yet. It’s for spelled bullets or just plain magic, compressed. Some people have been messing with that technology, with projectile magic. It keeps melting the guns.”

“FUCKING GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.”

“Why?” asked Squall. “Is it not ready yet? Not sure if it’ll break when I shoot it?” 

“It will NOT you think I made a gun that falls apart like that??” Seifer snapped, sounding marginally more sane now that his skills had been brought into question. “For your INFORMATION all of my tests are always successes and GIVE ME BACK HYPERION.”

“You have Shell on, Almasy?” asked Squall. 

Now, he thought he knew how it worked, but he wasn’t sure he knew how to work it. Magic + bullet could go a few kinds of ways, none of which he had heard were particularly successful in the past. Shiva?

She did something one could describe as laughing, if you could feel laughter in your humerus and scapula and clavicle and it felt like it was skittering all around. Try Diablos.

“YOU TRY TO SHOOT HIM AND I AM FUCKING COMING FOR YOU,” Seifer threatened, though what that threat meant at this point was anyone’s guess.

“Will you?” asked Squall, half-distracted, as a darkness started eating up the edges of his vision. Diablos’s terrible G force made him feel weightless, small, compressed into a pinprick. Seifer’s voice warped. 

I can’t tell you what will happen to the cute abomination you’re holding, said Diablos, whose voice made his head ring, but I can tell you you’ve lighted on a good way to punch a hole through reality. 

Works for me, Squall thought past the whirring emptiness. 

The feeling of emptiness heightened and snapped when Squall pulled the trigger. It barreled first through him, back to front, and then through the barrel of the gun. He had the embarrassing experience of almost being knocked flat on his ass by the vicious recoil; he had felt recoil before, but this was less like having your arm snapped by a gun firing and more like having your core punched by magic. He staggered backward. 

The effect was soundless, which was a certain eerie quality of Diablos’s abilities. For a second he couldn’t see, then the blackness in front of him narrowed, shrunk, until it was a manageable six foot wide and perhaps twenty foot deep hole in the ground, diagonally, where rocks and brush and dust had been a second before, like someone had bored a hole at an incomprehensibly weird acute angle from the ground. It was preternaturally dark, then there was a second to unbalancing pressure, and then it was a regular, impossible hole in the ground.

Squall didn’t hardly have time to process the fact that he had just de-existenced a sizable chunk of the ground in front of him before he was hearing bullets. Something above his head shattered; he ducked but only felt little prickles and slivers of shrapnel on his shoulders. He got through most of the motions of hefting Hyperion up to bear again but hadn’t gotten to the point of processing whether he wanted to do THAT again or just shoot a normal bullet when he saw movement in his periphery. 

Sensibly enough, Seifer had moved way out of range of the shot. Insanely enough, he had decided to run right at Squall. Whether he deftly avoided the ‘bullet’ or whether he had gotten lucky and just been above the low shot was anyone’s guess. Squall quickly slashed with Hyperion’s blade, just to establish his perimeter, and struck way wide. Seifer had to jump back again. He was wielding his pistol, one-handed, not aimed at anything in particular. In fact, it almost looked—

Squall’s halfway rational processing of the battlefield was cut off by Irvine’s admirable attempt to cap Seifer’s kneecaps from his other side. Weaponless, he had struck out at Seifer with a literal plywood board he tore off of the shoddy temporary cabins and attempted to take his legs out from under him. Seifer shouted in honest surprise; he had gotten close to even forgetting Irvine was there with his hyperfocus on Squall and Hyperion. He aimed his pistol, jumped back, and then startled a second time, visibly. Probably, that was when he recognized who the second assailant (Irvine) was. 

Squall got ready to fire. Seifer, by the looks of it, got ready to fire too, and naturally Irvine didn’t try to lunge for him or take the gun out of his hands, because Irvine would honestly rather surrender than take it into close quarters combat. He jumped back and reached a hand to his belt, where he probably had some kind of spare weapon. Squall couldn’t remember. 

A bullet screeched past all three of them. Irvine jumped backward, Seifer snapped his head at whoever had shot it, and Squall (with his head feeling like it had dropped from his shoulders) called on Diablos again to smack a bullet almost straight into the ground under his feet, between him and Seifer. 

The ground jolted. Seifer momentarily wobbled, looking horrified. Probably at the unorthodox use of his weaponry. The hole that appeared in the ground this time was larger than the last one, with jagged edges, since he had hit the stone almost point-blank. Actually, he backed up a step himself, arm stinging from firing Hyperion twice. 

Stars, it was beautiful.

While Squall was momentarily dazzled by the power of the gun, Seifer took the time to wheel back and literally throw the pistol at Squall’s head. It landed with a crack almost dead-center in his forehead and fuck him if he thinks Seifer might’ve not just given him another concussion. He wasn’t feeling it, yet, but he knew from the whiplash that immediately filled his skull with white noise that it wasn’t good. 

He heard himself say something, hell if he knew what. He felt a scuffle near to his left he couldn’t quite see; he brought Hyperion to bear and then paused. He didn’t know who was standing right in front of him, he suddenly couldn’t see in the light, whether it was Irvine or Seifer—

Carbuncle? He asked. 

I hope you know what you’re doing, whispered a nervous, shimmering voice. 

He heard what he thought was Selphie, and she was almost definitely telling Irvine off. He definitely felt another bullet tear through the air, maybe two, and then he pulled the trigger on Hyperion, right where he could fuzzily see bodies struggling. 

He couldn’t even keep his eyes open. He hit dead on. There was a short, percussive burst of noise, that then fell immediately silent. In the next second, he could feel a sharp tug on his arm. Selphie had run up to his side, had planned on running headlong into the struggle and then, seeing whatever was that Squall had just done, had grabbed onto his bicep to stop dead. (How he was sure it was Selphie he couldn’t say, but he knew it was.)

“Hyne, Heaven, and Hell,” Selphie squealed, which was the first thing Squall heard clearly, partly because it was very close to his ear. His eyes were watering, the one on the side where the pistol had struck him watered heavily. 

She started moving, so he did too; as he got nearer, he could finally see, mostly, what was going on. It looked—

Huh. That worked. 

Seifer was literally red now. Carbuncle had lacquered him with so much something that he looked almost frozen except for his chest heaving. Whatever kind of magic it was, it had hit Irvine too, but hadn’t hurt him. He was kneeling on the ground, panting, technically apprehending Seifer in that he had an elbow on his bent back. 

“What—Irvine—What—” Selphie babbled, falling onto the ground next to him. She smacked his face with an anxious hand a few times. 

“I dunno,” he panted, running a hand through his hair. “Shit, I dun—why am I magenta,”

Squall slowly lowered himself in front of Seifer, carefully examining the situation in front of him. Seifer was bowled over, his forehead almost reaching his knees, panting. He didn’t respond to Squall kneeling in front of him. Carbuncle? He asked. What did you do?

!!!Shot the magic in the thing like you asked!!! whined Carbuncle. You said you need to hit them and can’t hurt them because Irvine is good so you asked me to do a big very good Shell so nothing could touch them and I got them right in time because That Guy was about to shoot some Really Bad Magic—

Aaaaa shut up Squall thought, nearly puking when the dizziness of Carbuncle’s glittery, spinny thoughts jerked his head around. He squinted his eyes open and looked at Seifer again; under the sparkling shell that Carbuncle had just put on him, some of his skin looked—

“Burnt,” Squall growled, and skewed his eyes shut. “He’s badly burnt, he must have cast a fire spell right before I put a Shell on him.” 

“Bitch,” Irvine wheezed, leaning back as Selphie scrambled over his lap to get at Seifer. “You were going to hit me with a Fira??”

“Holy shit, Seifer, are you—” Selphie began, experimentally patting his shoulder with her palm. She winced. “Uhhhhh oh. Squall,”

“I hear you,” he growled, his throat throbbing. He had developed an almost instant migraine from the strike to his temple and everything else that had just happened. “Get him—get him in custody, fuck’s sake, we’ll drag him inside and fix him up.”

“Got it,” said Irvine and Selphie at the same time. (While they were typically his least favorite couple as a unit, in an emergency, they immediately became his favorite). Selphie almost rolled behind Seifer to hitch his arms behind his back; she called out to one of the younger SeeDs to bring her cuffs. At the same time, Irvine sat in front of Seifer, carefully, on one knee, and extended a hand to lift up his chin. 

Squall had his eyes closed, initially, for what happened next. He heard a scuffle and a silenced scream; he opened his eyes and saw that Seifer, whose face had been burnt black, nonetheless had lunged for Irvine when he touched him and now had his wrist in a scorched vise. The person who screamed had almost definitely been Irvine who, looking at Seifer’s now-scarred face and the candle flame-blue eyes, tinted violet under Carbuncle’s influence, glaring like faerie lights out of the charred skin, looked like his heart had fucking stopped. Squall also hesitated for a single second in his shock, because Seifer was less than a foot away from him, burnt to incapacity, and still, with nothing but willpower—

Selphie, however, now that she had had her captive’s arms wrenched away from her grasp, was feeling less in awe and more pissed. With her hands free, she grabbed her nunchaku from her hip while Seifer squeezed Irvine’s wrist. She wheeled back for (if Squall was guessing her aim right) a smack right between Seifer’s shoulder blades, so Squall responded by pushing forward, on his somewhat shaky legs, to shove Seifer’s head back and give her a better surface of impact. 

That actually wasn’t her trajectory. With everyone around as shocked as shocked could be, Selphie lashed out to loop the chain of her weapon around Seifer’s neck and tug back, which now caught Squall’s arm just as he reached out to grab Seifer’s face. He felt himself yanked forward and with the migraine settling into his beaten temples and his balance disrupted it was all Squall could do to tense enough to not fall forward onto him. Even so, he was yanked almost to Seifer’s face and could feel the disorienting, radiating heat from the skin he had just baked an inch deep with fire magic. 

Squall’s blood pressure spiked and hit the roof. The seconds flew fast and they were as dizzy as they were panicked, with purpled, bloodshot eyes radiating just inches from his face. Seifer looked like blackened death. Squall’s hand was seized into a claw about an inch from his face and the tightening of the chain meant he couldn’t move it. Seifer was certainly in range to do something ugly to him; but another inevitability changed his contemplation of doing so, if he had even had such contemplations. 

The shock of being torn forward almost onto Seifer’s chest had caused him to drop Hyperion. He hadn’t even realized it until he heard the clatter of the delicate blade settling, with annoyance, on a bed of stone. 

Both men immediately turned their attention to where Hyperion now lay, cast off from Squall’s right hand, equally near to both of them.

When Seifer tensed to move, Selphie yanked him back as best as she could with the chain (he had twice her strength if not more), but more importantly, Squall was able to push back against him. His body was fever-hot; Carbuncle had pressed his fire upon his skin, where it burned. Searing uncomfortable sparks bounced off his skin as he was forced to grapple directly with Seifer, instigating flinches in his tense muscles. When he clutched at Hyperion, Squall used his only free hand to snatch Seifer’s hand out of the air. It turned, badly, on his wrist, almost into his palm. 

Seifer was making horrible noises. Short breaths. Pain.

Seifer lunged for Hyperion, twisting desperately against the bonds at either side of him. Squall’s wrists both flashed with pain where they were being turned, one with the straining bonds of a chain, the other with the tense, pinching twist of another hand. His fingers were blunt, strong, and very hot. He shoved backward with his core to try to move Seifer back, and they both were forced into a twisted pose.

There was a flash of heat, outside of his vision, but palpable. Squall could literally feel Seifer convulse, under his chest. He shouted, but it barely made a noise. There was light on Squall's left side; Irvine had cast a fire onto his little beam of plywood. Magic would have bounced off of either of them, but a bit of wood on fire could be shoved neatly into Seifer’s side. With him already burnt all over the pain must have been apocalyptic. His body seized up like stone.

Squall’s stomach dropped. He was only inches from his face. He saw how Seifer looked so terribly hurt. All for struggling against the odds. 

Then there was a bright flash, a sort of indefinable color, purplish, and the scent of sweet magic. It dyed Seifer a slightly darker color for a second and then bounced. 

It was a Sleep spell. Squall didn’t know who had cast it. And he couldn’t blame them for not realizing what Squall had done in firing Carbuncle at Seifer. They would have absolutely no idea that the dark magenta glow around Seifer would absorb the spell and sling it right back. 

There was nothing Squall could do. He was already under so much strain, and he hadn’t seen the spell being cast or even registered what it was until his sight started blurring and the pain in his arms went dull. It was only with dim, flickering horror that he was semi-aware of his useless body slumping forward, onto Seifer’s pain-tightened chest. 

It wasn’t a stupid call. That would have been a good time to cast a sleep spell on an incapacitated Seifer. He couldn’t blame them. It was understandable. It was a mistake, but understandable.

—

Original Note:

Literally. Thrilled to have a little bit of time to write/edit between semesters. This chapter has existed at least in part for MONTHS but I’ve just been going in frantic circles IRL y’all don’t even know. Personally my favorite detail in this chapter is that Irvine calls both Squall and Seifer ’brother’ in the first scene... it’s subtle but, it is there. I actually was not going to write the Irvine scene at first but I made it happen because I was so charmed by the thought of taking some time with Squall and Irvine’s friendship even if it ended up gobbling up a few thousand words but anyway

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(Unfinished) There's been a change of plans.

The first thing he saw was Selphie Tilmitt, peacefully curled up under a patchwork quilt, her hands wound into the fabric like the claws of a cat. She had a little smile on her face; she looked like she was really enjoying the rest. 

The first thing he felt were the slowly increasing pangs of a migraine. He squeezed his eyes shut, knowing that it would hurt much, much worse if he moved anything too fast. There were, he could feel, now that he focused, points of pain all around his body, like angry reverse chakra. That was no less than he could expect, honestly, after what had just happened...

...Ah, fuck. 

Despite the entirely predictable, sickening pain, he made himself sit up. He had been dumped in a bed alongside Selphie Tilmitt, clothes, grime, speckles of blood and all. She had been tucked in near the wall with a pillow under her head and a quilt around her; Squall had been dumped on the same bed next without any such amenities. The wall above her stretching to a low ceiling was cheap plywood and the room was drafty. Squinting his eyes shut again for a moment of relief, he recognized the ruffle and brisk, wet smell of the wind. He slowly, carefully moved his pounding head to look at the floor and saw shattered glass and a rapidly discarded pair of underclothes. 

They were in one of the cabins. They hadn’t been moved far. The low effort removal and lack of a guard, but with careful preference for Selphie, showed all the telltale signs of Irvine Kinneas. 

He had probably carried her in himself. Squall, they would have needed another man.

But of course he didn’t spend much time on either of us, Squall informed himself, doing the kind of awful work of getting into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. They had a bigger problem they had to remove. 

But why hadn’t Irvine—Right, because Carbuncle had hit him with the Reflect spell too. Bracing himself, Squall placed his feet carefully onto bits of the wood floor without any glass on them. Standing up was not the worst effort he’d ever been through, though that may be damning with faint praise. He put his hand on the wall, and started walking. 

It happened again. 

Shiva’s icy, whisking hiss made him wobble on his feet a little, though he resolutely dug his fingers into the wall and kept walking. It’s just pain. It’s nothing new, he said to himself, and to Shiva, impatiently, what happened again? Of course, she heard both things anyway.

We were severed.

It was just a sleep spell, Squall grumbled, seizing the doorknob carefully so that he didn’t fumble it when he opened the door. He braced himself for daylight, but it was dusk outside, purple, temperate, falling in low shades from the curving canyon walls. If it was dusk, then, for most of the day… We’re always severed when I’m asleep.

No, Shiva argued, and her voice tapped impatiently and coldly somewhere near the base of his spine. He shivered. You no longer sense me when asleep. I still sense you. 

Then I guess it’s because I passed out again, or because it was magic. He cast his eyes around the fairly ruined camp until he lighted on the cabin that was the obvious source of noise and movement. He could see backs, hands, flickers of people through its broken window. Didn’t we test that once?

Years ago, she complained, and he honestly didn’t remember. This shouldn’t be happening so often. Nothing you’re doing should have the power to sever our connection.

He slouched himself across the hard stone between the cabins without stopping to breathe. He didn’t even notice he left the door open to the cabin where Selphie lay sleeping behind him. Fuck’s sake, Shiva, I don’t know, he admitted. His steps thudded dully on the hard ground. They hadn’t taken off his shoes and his feet hurt. We agreed—we both knew— Shit, it was hard to remember. We both agreed to do things—differently. When we made a deal...

Yes, yes, she dismissed his mumbling, seeming to flicker and light around his body, a wave of bracing coolness. It isn’t typically done, how we do things. I don’t know any other God who still takes mortals this way. But twining you to me should have made the connection harder to break, not easier. And these are things that once would not have broken it. 

Maybe I have too many, Squall fuzzily surmised, grasping at potentials. Hell, maybe he did have too many GFs hovering around, in his ‘possession’ but not junctioned. Typically, he would wait to find a proper vessel for this one or that, but…

His hand knocked against the door of the cabin that seemed to be holding everyone right now. At his back was simply quiet, and the desert. I think not, Shiva considered, not unkindly. None of my fellow Gods which you have here would be so rude. I have some concerns, now, about this woman, who you call sorceress—

“Who is it?” asked a harried voice he couldn't quite place. 

“It’s Squall, let him in,” said Irvine, who sounded strained in his own way, but tired. 

Squall didn’t wait and opened the door himself. Inside was more or less the whole collection of everyone that had been in camp this morning; perhaps one or two were elsewhere, he couldn’t do the math right now. Most were in various stages of impatient lounging, feet tapping, hands fiddling. Irvine was slouched forward in a chair, exhausted-debonaire, right by the single bed that had been left inside this cabin. He was smoking and had smoked something already. On the little table at his side, beside the ashtray, was a half-eaten sandwich, a sizeable number of vials of medicine, an opened and emptied first aid kit, a pistol, and a worn paper-bound book. 

On the bed next to him was what he had to assume was Seifer Almasy. He was still mostly blackened; parts of him had been wrapped up, and he was facing the wall. His coat had been stripped and his wrists were cuffed now. There was still a shimmer of magic on him and more potently there was a miasma of pain, which made his body alternately tense and rigid, like he was being struck again, and again, every few seconds. 

Irvine had just said something to him. Squall wasn’t sure what it was. Seifer looked like he wasn’t passed out; he was probably conscious, based on the shifting of his body, but barely cognizant with the pain. He didn’t acknowledge that someone had walked in the room, he didn’t speak, he didn't turn to face him. 

Irvine waited for Squall to be aware of him. How he knew, Squall wasn’t sure, but he did. “We must have cast Dispel a dozen times,” he repeated himself. “It doesn’t seem to do anything. None of us go out on the field without a stock of cures but obviously we can’t cast any. So we manually put some painkillers in him, which also tranqs him a little, which is an added bonus, but it doesn’t exactly solve the problem.”

“What… is… the problem?” asked Squall, who probably could have figured it out, but his brain felt so damn slow.

“Well, I guess,” said Irvine, in a tentative tone, “Something happened when you shot Carbuncle at him, that—which is what you did, right?”

“Right.” More or less.

“Yeah, that sort of… locked the fire spell he had cast…. Inside the Reflect that Carbuncle cast on him. By which I mean that that Reflect spell was perfect, and two-sided, and has been looping the fire spell since it locked on to him.”

“Looping?” Squall asked.

“You ever seen a coal fire?” asked Irvine. “I got toured around an old mine in the south when the guys from FH were still campaigning to have us shut down the Garden. It was supposed to be a lesson in the follies of industry. Well, I learned about how industry is incredibly cool, because what has happened in this abandoned mine is that there has been a fire burning on natural coal for about 20 years now. Can you believe it? I asked how that could be done, how it could just keep burning forever, and they said to me, well, it burns slow.

“So, I went down, far as I could, to look at it. And it does. It burns slow. You could see the flames just… twitch, and stretch, on top of the lines of coal. It falls down them slowly, like incense. Because what it’s burning has already been burnt once. It’s already been squished to a little black husk by the weight of the earth. So now that it’s burning a second time, it’s going real slow. It just takes forever.

“So why not fix it up if it burns so slow? I guess that’s not pertinent to the situation,” he argued, turning his head to regard Seifer with frustration. “What I’m saying is, the same burning keeps happening, so there’s only so much damage it can do, especially since we can bypass Reflect with, like, needles, and get some contraband in this bastard.”

Squall winced despite himself. He didn’t know what Irvine was putting into Seifer, but now he had to wonder whether it was actually blocking the pain, or if he was actually locked in hallucinatory helplessness. Lovely. “How long has it been?” he asked, because that was still confusing him.

“Since Locke put you to sleep?”

“Sorry,” said a resigned voice.

“No hard feelings,” said Irvine for Squall. “Like. Eight hours. And I know what you’re about to say. ‘Dude, I’ve never seen any kind of shield stay up that long, not even from a GF.’ Or maybe you're about to say, ‘but Irvine, yours wore off!’” With that, he held up his hands so that Squall could see the peachy, non-magenta skin of his palms. “All those are fair observations, which is kind of why I wanted to go ahead and ask you, since you’re up, what you did.”

“...Where’s Hyperion?”

“Focus, man.”

“No,” Squall insisted, trying to make connections through the fog in his brain. “No, I need to see it… I need to work this out… It didn’t work how I thought it would…”

“Listen, can I get one of y’all to put a Cure on Squall? I’m out,” said Irvine, sounding concerned. 

Squall shook his head blearily. “No, no, I have Curas,” he mumbled. He hadn’t thought about using them. Someone approached him, but he interrupted their intentions by drawing on the magic he had stored and auto-casting. 

He always forgot how nice a Cura was when you were hard-up. He hardly ever used magic on himself and preferred medicine instead, seeing as his typical health complaints were headaches and insomnia. Curing yourself could lessen a headache caused by a blunt wound… it couldn’t cure a headache caused by ‘fuck knows is wrong with you.’ This time, though, the cold magic rippled over his skin like a shower, and when it dripped away, he saw more clearly. 

And he could see it now. There were traces of light that speckled and burst under Seifer’s Reflect shield, like sunspots. There was, in fact, some kind of recurring reaction happening underneath it. Squall gripped the back of a chair to kneel on the floor. (There were still quite a few pains that stabbed him as he knelt, as Cura wouldn’t just sweep away wounds that had a chance to scar or residual pain.) Once he was lower to the ground, and closer to Seifer, he examined his body, its twitches, the Hadean landscape of lava and land, and let it form the background to his grim considerations.

He had assumed Hyperion had been rebuilt to channel and intensify magic. That did seem to happen, but there were also extra effects not just accounted for by intensification. A LONGER casting of reflect, that made sense. But he’d never seen this two-sided reflect before, that kept magic out and in. Nor did he see the odd effect of literally dying a person colors before. And Diablos’s cast had been…. Unexpectedly extra. Instead of a strong gravity effect, he had done that and just wholesale removed the affected areas from existence. Or, perhaps, they had been so weighed down they physically buckled.  

The question was, did the gun do something other than intensify magic effects, or is this what happens to God magic when it is past-the-even-horizon, especially compressed? He couldn’t help but think of Irvine’s little coal metaphor—there were things that transformed when pressed too tight. 

“Dispel doesn’t work,” he repeated.

“Not any we tried,” Irvine confirmed. 

“And I don’t have a GF who specializes… Esuna?”

“Did try it,” Irvine sighed. 

“Ice—no, that would be stupid,” Squall answered himself, leaning forward. “Unless—still stupid. Irvine, you’re sure you’re not still reflective?”

“Well—I guess I didn’t test it,” he muttered nervously. “Ugh. Okay. Hit me.”

Irvine wasn’t a particularly brave man, but he was always good at taking one for the team. Barely looking up at him, Squall slashed him with Ice, as lightly as he could. Irvine still winced backward when it wrapped around his arm and crackled into snowflake spikes around him.

“Ugghhhhh colldddd no I’m not still reflective,” he whined, shaking his arm. The magical ice shivered into glimmers and floated away. “So, it did fade from me faster.”

“I wasn’t aiming at you, you got splash damage,” Squall muttered. Seifer’s back tensed at nothing; with his arms drawn behind him by the handcuffs, it made the muscles of his back bulge and jump like they were almost out of his skin. “Okay. What did Xu say?” he finally asked, falling back on his personal failsafe.

“Funny you should ask,” Irvine grumbled, with maybe a bare tenth of his usual spark. “So, despite swooping in here like a bat out of Hell, everyone’s favorite loose cannon came in with his head on his shoulders. It doesn’t usually take a single bullet to take out a radio set, considering the amount of redundancy we have built into it, but goddamn if he doesn’t know how to fire. So—”

“You… haven't spoken to Xu?” asked Squall, desperately hoping to change what he had just heard. . 

“Nope. I can’t get the thing to make a single goddamn noise. It’s bricked.”

Squall got to his feet. He felt dizzy. He felt pretty fucking pissed. “And it’s been eight hours? Get packed, now.”

Irvine, used enough to doing what Squall said, got to his feet, but his brow was pinched. The cigarette in his left hand had been burning ashes for a solid minute now. “Is it a great idea to— Squall, dude—”

Squall had gotten to the door, and had to grab the doorframe with one hand to turn around. “She’s going to be here any minute. Get packed. Get everyone packed. Fix up what cars we can. Move.”

“We have—we already fixed up the cars, he was blowing tires, we had spares, what—dude—” Squall had left the building and Irvine was hot on his heels. “Squall, you usually know what you’re about, and I don’t always badger you for an explanation when you tell me you know what you’re doing, but with Selphie still knocked out and Seifer—”

“The sorceress, Irvine. His wife? You don’t want to meet her. Get packed. Get moving. Strap Selphie in a seat and put Almasy in the trunk if you have to, but get moving.”

“But it—what—okay,” Irvine finally stressed, showing his palms. He flicked his cigarette onto the stone and stomped on it as he turned away from Squall. “I’ll get packed and get people in cars, but you gotta tell me where we’re going when you get back.”

Squall opened the door of the cabin he had slept in the night before. He hadn’t hardly left anything in here; his jacket, some ammo. He packed them up. He went searching for his blade before he even thought about it. With more pique than necessary, he turned around, left the cabin, and slammed the door. 

Then, he entered the next-door cabin, where Selphie was sleeping. She was still sleeping; he wasn’t sure why the sleep spell had hit her harder than him. He wasn’t worried about it right now, anyway. Knowing she wouldn’t wake up when under magical influence, he crossed the room in a few steps, bent down to her height, and slid his arms under her to grasp her, quilt and all. Breathing slowly and muttering, she mindlessly curled into him once picked up. 

When he opened the door, Irvine was practically in his face. “Oh,” said Irvine. 

“Where’s Hyperion?” asked Squall.

“You—man,” said Irvine, angry for a second, and then letting it all out in a huge burst of air. He clapped Squall on the shoulder. “Classic. Absolutely classic Squall. This guy. Hand me my girlfriend, I’ll get you your gun.”

—

In five minutes flat, and nearing dark, the cars were loaded up with anything worth taking. Anything left was shot a few more times or else burned wholesale, so that it wouldn’t be of use to the rebels. 

It wasn’t necessarily Garden practice. No one said anything about Squall ordering it. 

Minimal discussion ended with Squall saying he would sit next to Seifer in a car. The backseat, specifically, because everyone knows Squall can’t fucking drive, and because he wanted to be right there, available, when Seifer regained his sense, and immediately began pulling some horrendous bullshit. Because of that, a different SeeD was designated driver—and Hyperion was locked in the trunk, under the bed, where the spare tire had been, so that it wouldn’t be accessible to Seifer at any point. 

“Winhill,” Squall snapped at Irvine, right after wrenching the door to the already humming pickup truck open.

Irvine, who was making sure they had gotten the last of the supplies in their three good cars, on his way to buckling himself into the driver’s seat of the largest of them, threw a bag on his shoulder and said, “Winhill?”

“Closest operative radio station I know of, unless you know a closer one.” 

Irvine looked at the darkening sky, now smudgy with the soot they had clogged up the canyon with. “I don’t,” he admitted. “This was the covert station.”

Squall nodded. “Winhill.” 

“Alright,” said Irvine. He walked off to let the other drivers know of their location and plans for driving; Squall turned his back and got into the pickup.

When he shut the door behind him and silence fell in the darkened interior of the truck, except for its own slick rumbling, Squall felt like he had walked into a hearse. Since it was a big vehicle, meant for hauling, there was plenty of space back here; the seats were dark leather and they smelled like dirt. They weren’t especially dirty, but their working-class history let the aroma of grime and mildew fester. There wasn’t anyone else in here yet, and even when there would be, the high seats and distance in the cabin would keep him pretty isolated in the back. The windows were tinted; the whole thing went dark when the door shut. 

Seifer’s breathing was audible before Squall’s eyes adjusted enough to see him. He was slumped over himself, almost exactly where Squall had dumped him a minute before (not many others could carry him, let alone were willing to give it a go right now) but slumped a little further down in his seat. From what Squall could tell, the combination of the chemical cocktail they had pricked into him and the sheer pain he was undergoing had him essentially unconscious, if not fully insensible, right now. It might feel a little like a state of fever at this point. He was nearly unresponsive, but he was in custody. 

Squall felt his shoulders and arms go weak. The sense of relief, unwanted, was crushing. He had him. He couldn’t go anywhere. He was going to get him put away. He felt. 

Safe.

He slid the door shut behind him, and the very soft click when it slid into place brought with it a soft darkness in the interior of the truck. Squall shuffled himself until he was leaning against the door he had just come in through, mirroring Seifer slumped against the opposite wall. He was… already… very close to him, physically. Big old pickup or not, there was at most two feet of space between him, hand clutching and tapping on the door-handle, and Seifer, shoulders unevenly thrown against the back of the seat and the door on the other side. As Squall’s eyes adjusted he could see that Seifer wasn’t unmoving; his chest was working hard to breathe, and as tense as it was, he could still see the rounded bulk of his abc rise and fall with his strenuous breaths.

Squall considered a seat-belt briefly. He decided against it. He considered belting Seifer and also decided against that. 

About a minute passed in his watching Seifer breathe. 

The same SeeD who had accidentally put him to sleep earlier (Locke, it was) opened the door of the truck quietly and, to his credit, led his entrance with a hand that had a knife in it. A classic little black-handled piece, too, nothing fancy. It swerved casually almost into the passenger’s side as Locke climbed into the driver’s seat, facing forward but with an eye on the prisoner in the back. All Squall knew about him was that he passed his test about three years ago and he was supposed to be best at stealth missions, which was something Squall welcomed in his presence. It meant he was less likely to be assigned to a stealth mission.

“We’re good?” he asked Squall, less nervously and more doubtfully. He still had half an eye on Seifer’s slumped body. 

“Good enough,” Squall replied. 

Locke nodded and sheathed the knife, which he then put in his cup holder. Lights started flickering on crossways outside as the cars started up; in another minute, they were rumbling and bumping over the rough stone, on their way in full darkness to Winhill. 

That provided Squall with another issue—Seifer wasn’t really in control of his body. After a few solid jolts, Squall saw with alarm that he was about to slide out of his seat. Somewhere deep in whatever place he had gone too, Seifer struggled to brace himself against the sensation of falling, but he could hardly move his arms. It was pathetic—a few futile splashes from a drowning man. 

On instinct Squall grabbed at the collar of his shirt. With a little effort he hauled him back up onto the back of the seat. Still, he had to pull him more straight up than back against the opposite wall; nothing else would work, considering his angle. Seifer’s tense, too-warm body sprawled against the full back of the seat, for a moment motionless like he had been flung on the ground. Then he weakly tried to push against Squall, knowing, somewhere, that everything was not alright. 

Squall said a couple of fucks quietly and improvised. Letting gravity (and Seifer’s sheer bulk) help plot the course for him, he slowly eased his front half down across the seat. That meant that, after some shuffling, his legs had to be pulled up and more or less thrown across Squall’s lap. This was gross, because his pants and boots were filthy after the past 36 hours of his life, but it was what would get him the closest to being balanced back here while he couldn’t balance himself. The knocking and jolting of the truck over rough stone kept tossing him gently back against the seat; the casual dip in the leather and the forward momentum of the car meant he wasn’t likely to slide forward onto the floor. Squall felt like he was handling something absurdly delicate with the way his arms jangled and trembled positioning Seifer, halfway to on his lap, so that he wouldn’t just fall off the damn seat. 

Eventually, though, it was done, and this is how it was now—the unconscious prisoner laid like he was in bed in the backseat and partly braced on top of the jailer.

The driver didn’t say anything. He probably didn’t notice, since he was having a hell of a time driving through wild rocky terrain right after nightfall. This was a situation for Squall and only Squall to wrestle with. 

Seifer’s body was half-twisted against the back of the seat; his legs had to bend to fit on Squall’s lap. One arm was flung almost protectively across his chest, though of course its placement was incidental. It had landed where it fell. Still—as the waves of pain, perhaps the terrors of his hallucination, if he was in one, came over him, that arm went taught,a dnt he hand seized at the air just above his chest. 

His face—his vision of it came and went as the car bounced and the lights swam up and down. His face was clutched in a close-eyed grimace, as if shut by the fingers of a hand. If he was conscious he was still locked in. It was very dark with the soot of the fire, but his scars glimmered white. 

Squall was initially put off by the image of his pain, and he glanced away. But his eyes returned to Seifer's face, first in slipped seconds, and then, slowly, he began to be distracted by him. His face—the vision of it drifting in and out of the light clattered like stones in Squalls’ stomach. It made a thudding nervousness awake in him, and, initially, he had no idea why. It was much like seeing a ghost—the mystery of the scarred thing was what compelled some fear to rise inside of him, his lack of understanding of what was happening inside him right now. Without conscious awareness he was soon staring at Seifer’s face in the dark, with a flowing feeling rising inside of hip, lapping like waves, like the light pushed at the walls as the car rocked left and right.

Because there was something that kept occurring to him as he saw Seifer’s face materialize, again and again, in slightly different forms of agony, the creased flat brow, the wrinkled under-eyelid, bruised purple, the particular flat weight of his nose. That thing which occurred was a feeling like a spark, smacked against flint, that was at first a little nervousness, and then got closer and closer to fear as it occurred and reoccured. And like fire he didn’t have the substance of it; he couldn’t discern what it was that frightened him. Seifer made a noise in his half-somnolence like something was grinding in his throat, and Squall’s feeling of hot pain intensified. 

It was like he was being given a warning, almost, like he kept seeing a flash of movement in the corner, something which denoted danger. But he couldn’t parse the message. He didn’t know what the warning signified. He watched Seifer’s head tilt back against the leather of the car seat and the light flicker in another way on his closed eyes and, it occurred to him, he might be trying to remember something. 

This hadn’t happened in some time. It usually wasn’t relevant to current events that he couldn’t remember half (or more) of his life. His muscle memory and training were always preserved, even if he sometimes struggled to remember the context of learning. But this, this danger-feeling, this warning of his memory, was rare and getting more rare with time. It was more likely to bother him in Garden, when he went wo downstairs corners he theoretically used to haunt, or to Balamb Island, which he avoided. That it was happening now likely meant that Seifer’s face was reminding him of something—but he had lost that thing. 

Could it be possible? Surely. He knew that he had known Seifer ‘all his life.’ He knew they were both acquired around age five, because he had seen papers that said so. He knew that they had even known each other before then, because—though vaguely—he can recall Seifer saying so, a long time ago. But earlier than 15, 16 in bad patches, he doesn’t know anything personally. That’s why he relies on records, papers, exact reports. 

Was there some disaster which occurred he was trying to remember now? Not likely because he had never seen any record of any such thing. Was he meant to believe the lost memory of some private despair was prickling at him, which had not been shared with outside sources?

Reasoning didn’t help. The sourceless feeling still welled up. Whether he knew what it was or not it stretched from bone to bone, filling up his stomach with burning trash and tapping up at his skin from inside. He reflexively tried to move away from Seifer, but, obviously, he was trapped by the little boundaries of the car. It rocked, and the light came up and down. And his scar, in the center of the burnt-up skin, was so bright. 

It was, in its own shitty way, fortunate that Squall was so unwillingly rapt, because he had the good fortune of being watching in the moment when Carbuncle’s focused Reflect shield suddenly flickered and died, leaving Seifer starkly black, white, and burnt. 

Squall’s body, overtaxed by what he can only categorize as a mental episode, reacted slower than what he would like. He could see the light die on Seifer and he watched the fire that was lingering on his skin suddenly flare up bright for a second and then extinguish, digging its pale fingers for a final moment in Seifer’s skin. (The car slowed quickly, but Squall didn’t look at the driver.) He still didn’t quite react until, after a moment of death-like stillness, Seifer very suddenly convulsed, thrashing against the new sensation—or his new awareness of it. He tried to move his arms and they were, of course, cuffed; with frightening precision or damn good luck one leg fumbled until it smacked into the door behind Squall. In another moment, despite making a noise like an old oven struggling to open against the rust of generations, Seifer began to haul himself upright on the seat. 

Finally, Squall kicked himself out of his reverie and into action. Arms shaking (what was that? Why couldn’t he move just now?) He shoved Seifer’s leg out of the way to unbalance him again. It was pretty effective, because he was so pathetically outmatched right now. But he didn’t take it down quite like he had been doing just a minute ago. Regardless of the drugs in his system, Seifer attempted to fight being pushed down, even when Squall leaned forward to shove a hand on his midsection and ram it into his diaphragm. He tried to move his arms again; his voice was a sluggish, unhappy growl, probably where it fought with the lethargic effects of the sedatives. 

Squall crushed his hand in his midsection until Seifer was forced to let out his air, with a very unhappy groan. His head knocked backward against the other side of the car again. Squall was still shaking. He stared at him too long; legs badly angled, awkwardly taking up the room where they could fit on one side of his body, torso twisted, and that ugly mask of pain. Squall took an uncomfortable, fast breath, curled his fingers into Seifer’s fever-hot midsection (featuring a little layer of surrendering fat over some truly ridiculous abs) and began to pump Cura into him. 

The light flared green and filled up the back of the car in slow, liquid loops. (The driver was doing an incredible job.) Seifer thrashed. His muscles seemed to tense and bulge under Squall’s hand as he fought against sheer exhaustion to throw him off. Squall leaned forward, gripped Seifer’s shoulder with his left hand, and shoved him harshly against he seat so that his left hand could keep pushing magic into him. It wasn’t easy; it wasn’t being received. It felt like he had to shove every spell through a barrier that slowed, muddied, dispersed half of everything. Not to mention the fact that Seifer was physically fighting him, as well as he could, bucking against the hand that held him down in a way that dug the rough fabric of his shirt into Squall’s fingernails.

It took a few rounds to work, but eventually Seifer’s skin started reversing the burn damage. As Squall kept him wrestled down, bits of pale flesh surfaced from under the soot like rocks out of magma, and knit into each other. Fresh skin glimmered in pale, uneven patches with his normal tan. The cuts and slashes connected and purpled. Seifer also began to regain some portion of his strength; Squall's attempt to heal him was shut off exactly when Sefier was able to brace his elbow under him and shove himself up far enough to present a reasonable threat. 

Seifer reared up close to his face; Squall lifted up the hand that had been clutching his stomach and smacked the other shoulder with it. Despite his struggling it still wasn’t hard to force Seifer down once he had a grip on both his shoulders. He inevitably found himself mostly on top of Seifer as he pushed him down. He hissed “Stop.”

Seifer didn’t usually agree with one-word commands. Squall could remember that clearly. He got reminded of it anyway when he did his level best to knee Squall in the gut from below. The strike was uncharacteristically slow and weak, so Squall was able to shove him off with his own knee. 

Seifer made another heartfelt but vain attempt to strike at him (Hyne, the constitution on this guy). Squall suddenly and for no reason known to him started boiling because this guy was supposed to be fucking subdued by now. He had won, goddamn it, he got him in custody, cuffed, and safe. Without thinking he reached back and punched him once, solidly, in the side of his face. “Stay down.”

Sadly, a two-word command didn’t have much more of an effect. Squall got a half-second glance of a blazing blue eye before Seifer tensed his stomach muscles and pulled himself up in an attempt to headbutt Squall right off of him. Incensed, Squall smacked the other side of his head when it rose up with the flat of his palm, waited until he winced, and then drove his elbow into his nose. It snapped, as they always do when you’ve got enough heft behind your strike. He could feel the wince all through Seifer’s shoulders as he buckled forward. 

That was fortunate for him, because that meant Seifer’s head was under his, and his back was bent. Squall once more brought a heavy hand down on him, to the back of his neck, which made him curl and choke. He kept his hand there and pressed his head down. “I said stay down, you son of a whore,” he snarled at him, flexing and unflexing his fingers through the pulses of Seifer’s little struggles. 

Seifer made a rough noise in his throat, and spat. His back tensed, and Squall used his forearm to press his neck down. 

“Fine, you—you win, fuck you.”

Though his words had to be absolutely croaked out of a dry, strained throat, they leeched strength out of Squall’s body. 

It had been so long. 

The enormity of time crushed him. Eight years of his partner being dead. He thought he would never hear that again. He hadn’t been able to think about never hearing that again. It had been too painful. He hadn’t even remembered how his voice sounded—that garbled, seething resentment. It floored him more than actually seeing Seifer for the first time had. 

You win, you fucking prick. Fine, asshole, let me go. Goddamn, Princess, alright.

He must have been shaking when he lifted his arms off of Seifer’s neck. He felt a little sick to his stomach and a little stupid as he slowly, incrementally backed off. 

Seifer took some deep, steadying breaths. He rolled his shoulders as best as he could, and Squall heard them crackle and set. He lifted his head and, once he was facing Squall, tilted it to one side, then the other, cracking his neck on both sides. When he faced him fully, giving him a very visceral view of his split lip, bruised cheekbones, and bleeding nose, which was dripping sluggishly down one side of his face almost to his chin, he opened his eyes and regarded Squall back. 

It was more than not making a move to attack; Squall was sure he wouldn’t. Squall had almost forgotten the language of his twitches, tells, tips, the whispered signals that told him Seifer’s next move. But he hadn’t quite. Their familiar tones told him that he wasn’t going to strike again, not yet. 

“Okay,” said Seifer, letting Squall’s eyes go to look first up, then briefly around. “Alright, we’re in a car.” This included staring briefly at Locke, who, Squall saw, had been quietly, stubbornly guiding the car through the dark night with both hands on the wheel. (In fact, though his left hand was clutched to the wheel, in his right, he had a little switchblade nestled in the clutch of his middle and forefinger, pressed to the wheel, with the blade flickering minutely in the light when he moved the wheel up and down. Squall hadn't heard him say anything and had no idea when he did that, because he hadn’t drawn any notice to himself.)

“Alright,” Seifer continued, echoing his own assurance. “Where’s my gun.” 

Of course. His first concern. Squall felt like something fluttered in his neck. “We’ve got it.”

Seifer scoffed, but somewhat noncommittal, like a cat hissing to show basic discontent. “So the trunk?” he asked casually. 

Squall didn’t like it, but he was right. “You think.”

“You’re not going to let it get too far from you, and—” Seifer winced when he turned his head over his shoulder to indicate the trunk. He was feeling some side effects. “—that’s about the only place in the car I can’t get to easily. Except the engine, where you’re not putting a gun.”

It was all solid reasoning. It was correct. The slips of moonlight coming in from the gauzy-shaded night outside made him look like the mottled dead, half-pale. “Huh,” said Squall. 

“Where are we going?” 

Squall raised his eyebrows at him. 

“Well, I can try to figure it out by myself, or you can just tell me. Unless you’re really going to dump me out and shoot me before we get there.”

He said it with complete doubt, but something still panged uncomfortably in Squall. He knew it wasn’t outside of his reputation. It wasn’t even fully outside his consideration. “I’m not helping you out.”

Seifer glared at him briefly. It was a sort of puffy, soft glare, now that bruises were spreading on his face again. “Yyyeah,” he acknowledged. He leaned back against the other side of the car, rolling his back slowly again. (Had Squall jostled something? He didn’t remember already.) 

Once his head was almost knocked onto the window, Seifer turned to watch the bluffs slowly bouncing in and out of view behind him. “West… Southwest,” he muttered to himself, his eyes drained to almost silver when he stared up at the moonlight. “And to get from Home to where we were… right… depends on how long I’ve been out…” 

Might be a good time to interrupt his thought process. “You didn’t take a vehicle with you,” Squall noted. “Actually, we found barely any equipment on you.”

Seifer’s eyes flickered toward Squall to glare at him again. The softness of his gaze at the hills and cliffs outside the window and the harshness of his looks at Squall chafed against each other. The fierceness Squall incensed in him could be sudden, now especially, when it seemed to be quickly aroused. It was—ugh—he kept thinking this, but it was nostalgic. This more irascible, unpredictable Seifer was harder to manage, but exponentially more familiar. Reaching for a teen inside of a man, generally, does involve driving him to emotional excesses. 

“No, really?” asked Seifer, sarcastically, but not too fiery. “I had to follow you out after you forked your way into the control system and jacked a bike. I didn’t have time to pick shit up.”

“...Really?” asked Squall, despite himself. “The cars were right there, so—”

“I know the cars were right there!” Seifer snapped. “I wasn’t thinking about finding the stupid keys to a stupid car, I was thinking about taking your head off of your shoulders.” He delivered the second half of the line at the window, again, keeping his gaze away from Squall. “Maybe be glad I didn’t catch up to you sooner.”

Implying he had been more incensed than he was when he arrived at camp? Hyne. Squall felt a little knock in his heart, a bit too hard, a bit too deep, push blood through him. The pads of his fingers tingled. He grit his teeth against it. “That’s.” Once upon a time, he would have just told him it was stupid. “A little amateurish for you.”

Seifer turned to face him again, his silvered eyes wide. “I think that was the barest scrap of respect. Thanks, I’ll take it. That’s professional, for you.” 

You prick— He could feel that pulse shimmering in his fingers. “I know you can do better than that,” Squall clarified, speaking just a little faster than his thoughts. 

Seifer shrugged in a way that indicated he would have done a hand gesture, if he had use of his hands. “Sorry! We all roll low some days. I was a little stressed already!”

Squall had to kind of strain to remember the order of events exactly, and lighted on something he had found odd. “You had a system-wide power outage,” he mused, “at least one. That’s how I got out of my cell in the first place; that’s why things were scrambled enough that—we could hack into the system. What causes an outage in a system like that?—”

“You sure don’t have to worry about that,” interrupted Seifer with a heavy sarcasm coloring his voice. He meant ‘don’t try, I’m not telling.’ “Better question, how did you get into it in the first place?”

Squall hesitated just a half second too long. It probably wouldn’t matter in most interviews. “Oh, it wasn’t you,” Seifer continued, answering his own question. “Of course it wasn’t you. Was that—look, it’s been a while, and a person changes in ten years—”

He was going to see her soon anyway. “Selphie will no doubt be excited to talk over it with you when she has the time, yes.” More excited, and potentially more candid, than she should be.

“Selphie Tilmitt,” Seifer breathed, with a hint of wonder in his voice. “Incredible. THERE’S someone who should know better than to go down with Galbadia, no offense to you, Squall.”

This shit again. Squall decided to not follow Seifer’s broken logic, and he hoped that his steadily increasing pulse agreed. “Don’t even say ‘no offense’ if you do in fact mean offense,”

“My bad! Full offense, Squall, you are not the sharpest scalpel in this operation.”

Actually, he had stopped being offended by that one a long time ago. That was why he had people like Selphie around, on top of her being, what was it, ‘your friend who cares about you.’ “I don’t have to be. I didn’t take a leadership position I’m wildly unqualified for.” 

Seifer actually bopped his head back onto the car window to laugh. Squall wasn’t exactly trying to land a joke, but. (His adam’s apple bobbed in his pale, bruised throat.) “Fuck you!” Seifer said with a bit of barbed cheer. “Love it. You don’t know our situation or what we do or don’t have in hand, okay, asshole?” his mood dropped with every word, until he was looking at Squall with a cocked eyebrow and a very faint smile. “Unless you got a better idea of how things stand on the continent now?”

Something Squall would be forced to label fear squirmed, like a little worm, deep in his core. If Irvine and Selphie’s report was even half true—this man had a sizable amount of the continent in chaos, ostensibly in the Sorceress’s name. 

“Not having titles and badges is not being unqualified, Squall.”

“For—”Squall bit his teeth again after annoyance flared up in him. “Honestly, it’s kind of a shame you aren’t giving out overbearing prick awards on your side of the line.” That’s all that badges and titles were in Galbadia, and he knew that full well, actually, he just didn’t usually smacktalk someone he was in contract with behind their back if he could help it. 

“Sure, it might make me easier to identify,” Seifer continued, breezily moving past that one and establishing again that he had matured somewhat. “As it stands, people usually identify me by the scar.” He didn’t change his position, and yet, his eyes were suddenly hot on Squall’s face. “Convenient, actually, more than people think, to have the facial scar.”

“Inconvenient, I would think, for someone on the run.” Squall kept his voice steady. 

“Is it not inconvenient for a spy?”

“They know better than to have me spy,” Squall countered. “I don’t typically go undercover. I can do my business in the light of day.” 

“Incredible, the kinds of things we can fucking stand for in a society,” Seifer huffed, rolling his head just slightly over his left shoulder. “Nothing you do is anything to be ashamed of.” 

“Don’t bother,” Squall told him. “We don’t agree. We’re not going to.”

“Well, THAT’s not new,” Seifer countered swiftly and acerbically. It still bothered Squall that Seifer was so quick to bring up their past together—obviously, it was all he could think about himself—but he was so casual about it, like time hadn’t really past. Sometimes he made it feel like he actually just had clawed his way out of eight years of stasis. But he also had eight years of building up a new life to show for it. “I’m going to say it used to be a whole lot more fun than this, though.”

“What?” asked Squall.

“Pissing you off?” he almost-asked, tilting his head. “I didn’t used to fear for my fucking life every time you felt an emotion.”

“Didn’t you? Disappointing,” Squall fired back without consulting his higher reasoning. 

“Not until recently? It was REALLY hard to feel seriously threatened by a guy who instantly turned red when he got embarrassed. Where’d that go, anyway?”

WHAT? There’s no way that was EVER the case. Feeling like the thumping in his chest had moved up to his neck, Squall gripped the back of the car seat to steady himself. “That never happened.”

“It happened literally all the time. Usually when you couldn’t think of anything to say.”

“Wh—”

“Least I assume so, since it was usually the end of the conversation.”

Squall was briefly gobsmacked. His brain momentarily looped. A small, terribly smug smile crept in increments up one side of Seifer’s face. Squall had figured out something dismissive to say, most of the way, but then Seifer almost inaudibly chuckled at him. It was honestly nothing more than an amused outtake of breath, but that was enough to make Squall immediately forget his planned retort. 

“That NEVER happened.” 

“It used to happen all the time. I guess more often when you were younger,” Seifer said, the grin slipping off his face as the sentence continued. “So, you might not even know like I do.”

Squall felt stung for a second. He really felt like something physically pricked at him, and then his heart throbbed. He didn’t—this wasn’t—something he liked to think about. It didn’t bear thinking about it. He couldn’t fix it. He shouldn’t worry about it. 

Shiva hissed a quiet word of warning as his thoughts started to go fast. They halted. 

“...You said,” Squall said, forming this sentence around the pulse in his throat, “that you ‘remember’ where we’re from.”

It felt absolutely terrible to say it out loud. It felt so lean and pathetic. How Seifer’s expression went first sharp, then carefully blank, it also felt terrible. His expression grew intense but inscrutable, cast in pieces like a reading of cards as the dim lights of the car scattered across his face. 

“...What do you remember?” Seifer asked him. 

That was too carefully open-ended. He felt like Seifer had been prepared for this, and he didn’t like thinking that Seifer was prepared for anything. “I don’t remember where we were, before Garden,” he continued, equally carefully, “But you assumed that already.” He’s not going to say Seifer KNEW that. 

“I did…” Seifer acquiesced, and his eyes sought a distant point as he considered his reply. “I had a few clues that told me you wouldn’t.”

Squall was interested despite himself. He would tell anyone who would listen that he wasn’t an intel guy and they had better SeeDs for that, but he wasn’t usually trying to unwrap the secrets of his own life. “I think you used to have the same problem,” he said, even though he wasn’t 100% sure on that one. 

“That’s—part of it—Listen,” Seifer interrupted himself, snapping his eyes back to Squall’s face. “Let’s do it this way. How far back can you remember?”

Squall clenched his fingers and then made himself relax. “Is that relevant?”

“It’s pretty damn relevant—”

“Why not just tell me the answer to the question?”

“Don’t counter-interrogate me, asshole,” Seifer snapped, his eyes briefly pinching. “That’s rude as hell, you know I was trained in the same thing.”

“Don’t fall for it.” 

“I DIDN’T, that’s why I told you to STOP,” Seifer insisted, much to Squall’s (hopefully) disguised satisfaction, “Alright, I’ll rephrase in your terms, jackass. We’ll do this my way or we’ll not do this at all. If you want to play jailer, I’ll shut up and play prisoner. If you want to talk to me, I’ll talk.”

Squall’s back prickled. He was aware that this was the same game Seifer kept trying to strongarm him into, but this awareness manifested above his subconscious only as a flash of annoyance. He didn’t take the time to unpack it before he said “What in Hyne’s name is my incentive for doing it YOUR way?”

“I just said. It’s the only way this is gonna happen.”

“Like—”

“And besides, what the hell is the—un—disincentive—what’s the downside?” Seifer argued. “What the fuck do you lose just having the conversation?”

What an excellent question. Squall hated it. He had heard it many times, and every time, it was disingenuous, sneaky, if not outright disgusting. What do you lose by talking about it? It was a question that only came from someone prying at you, slipping their nails in at the edges. Seifer knew goddamn well what he would lose by giving ground in this conversation; that was why he was refusing to give ground himself. To pretend that there were no consequences to a civil conversation between the two of them, at this point, when they had both gotten a millisecond away from killing each other in the past month, was such a slippery, underhanded little bit of convincing that coming from Seifer, it made bile rise in Squall’s throat. 

What could he lose? What could he fucking lose?

“You’re not getting any information,” Squall stressed, feeling hot-headed and cold underneath, “any information from me about events you’re not already privy to. That’s non-negotiable. It’s insulting that you think it is. Unless you have something to volunteer, that’s the end of conversation.” 

He didn’t like how Seifer looked at him. It was angry, and it was fierce, and it was changing; it moved it in the light. He couldn’t quite track it. And a bit of nervousness, stirred up by how hard his heart had been pounding, grew and grew in his stomach as the moments passed—he breathed once, then a second time, more slowly—and Seifer didn’t reply. 

Seifer ALWAYS had to get the last word. So this wasn’t it. But he wasn’t saying anything. He was just watching him. 

“...You were almost there, man,” he said, very quiet. 

“Excuse me?” Squall snapped. 

“I could almost see you.” 

Squall’s stomach jerked with an anxiety he hated. He felt—like—he had badly missed a mark. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do, but—” Seifer’s gaze had hardened into something between observation and a glare. “—I get you’re scared,” he finally said, and halting part of the way through saying something more.

Squall was actually, despite what others sometimes assumed, aware he didn’t have the most even keel. He also could give himself credit in that he was aware he could be worse. The most riled up he got about being told he was ‘scared’ was brief annoyance, and there are guys who would put your out a window for that. Even from this guy—maybe LESS from this guy, as he was pretty used to the barbs and petty insults.

Not… that that was a petty insult. Or. Not that it sounded like one. Squall knew he was doing that new thing he did again where he insisted on the absolutely certainty of dubious facts in his weird reality, and he probably wasn’t going to be convinced otherwise. (If it was an emotional manipulation tactic, though, it wasn’t bad.) “What would I be scared of,” he said, making an effort to turn it into a question by the end of the sentence but falling a little flat.

Seifer did it again—he waited to respond. Well, damn him for figuring out how to process his thoughts before replying, because Squall managed to find more to say, prickling under his tongue. “Are you about to say ‘of you?’ Why would I be? I know exactly who you are, new guns, new uniforms, and new wife aside. ‘Of your organization?’ Again, why? You know that whatever political upheaval and cosmetic changes you make to the continent doesn’t change Garden’s long-term success, or mine, at all. There are no bad outcomes. ‘Of retribution?’ If you think I’m not used—”

The chains that cuffed Seifer’s hands behind his back clanged as he forgot they were tied and tried to move them forward. He winced. He clicked one shoulder, with such a slow, audible clunk that Squall could tell it was killing him, and said, in a slow, laborious voice, “I know that you can tell something isn’t right inside you, and I know it unsettles you. It freaks you out. I don’t blame you. It used to freak ME out—”

Squall was forced to interrupt him but how very deeply he didn’t want to hear any more of that. He had gone cold. “You don’t have the right, not after—”

“Come on—”

“—You don’t even know me like that—” he faltered for a second, knowing he had to finish the sentence, or else Seifer would call him out on it, “—anymore.”

‘I know you better than you do,” he complained. “I remember you being six (CHECK) years old and afraid to fucking walk down the long halls at Garden by yourself because the Garden was so big and you couldn’t remember where they all went. Not that you wouldn’t go; you did it anyway and hated it. And you would get lost, you incredible dumbass, because you didn’t know where you were going.

“I remember when you almost flunked out of the damn fourth grade because your test anxiety was so bad you couldn’t take a written test in a room full of people. But you never told anyone, because you were just terrified the teachers would be disappointed in your, except we were kids and we lived with our teachers and you really could have just TOLD THEM instead of waiting until you got old enough we were all shuffled onto individual computers and left to our own devices.

“I remember when they had to finally put us in separate rooms because we wouldn’t stop fighting and you were scared to go, you actually told me you were scared to go, but on my life I couldn’t get you to say it in front of anyone who you considered an authority. So we got split up anyway even though neither of us really wanted it, and what I am trying to say to you is Squall, will you fucking talk to me?”

Don’t say anything, Squall warned himself. Don’t let him get to you—

Are you trying to imitate my voice? Asked Shiva, who had been keeping herself unobtrusive up to this point. I didn’t say that.

That’s usually your advice, Squall argued his case.

You can ask me my advice if you’d like it, huffed Shiva, and her icy sentiment made Squall involuntarily twitch.

“Squall,” said Seifer, again, with his back badly bent on the car seat so he could face him, his head a little lowered, his eyes sniper-focused.

What is your advice, Shiva, Squall asked, sounding dull even in his thoughts.

The car was slowing down, he noticed, in the back of his mind. The wheels were grinding around a tight corner.

“Fuck me for being so weak to—I could even, if you can’t ask out loud,” Seifer halted himself, looking out a window.

Doesn’t he have information you need? Asked Shiva, calmly, primly. And isn’t he asking very little for it?

‘What do you lose?’ he echoed, furiously, at her, at himself, at everyone here. ‘What do you lose just having the conversation?’ How can you ask me? You know—

“Boss, I know you’re busy,” said Locke, who was spinning his knife back into his hand, “but there’s no more driving I can be doing around these other parked cars, and if you don’t wrap up, it looks like Ms. Tilmitt’s willing to wrap things up for you.”

Squall startled out of his stupefaction. He felt shocked and above the situation, like by all rights, he should be somewhere up above all this with Shiva, and being aware he was having a bad reaction didn’t make it better. Dizzily, he half-stood up. Wordlessly, he reached forward, grabbed Seifer by his upper arm, and started yanking him out of the car.

Seifer tried to move with it instead of resisting it, probably because he didn’t want to be dragged across three leather seats and out into the road. All the same, he winced when Squall roughly jostled his arm to get him out of the car.

“Fuck—okay, I freaked you out, I get it, but you seriously do not—"

“Be quiet,” Squall snapped at him, and felt absolutely numb about it. His grip on Seifer’s arm was not very strong, but he couldn’t correct it without scrabbling at him. Even so, the man stood there, slightly hunched over, staring at him, as Squall struggled for his next words. “We’ve got—our objective in Winhill—is to get into contact with Garden, and you—”

“Act like this, and are you seriously going to—”

“SEIFERALMASY,” screamed Selphie Tilmitt, who vibrated VERY close to Seifer’s other side, her voice squeezed past frustration, excitement, anger, happiness, or surprise into a white-hot ur-emotion beyond Squall’s deciphering. Sefier’s eyes snapped down to her and then his whole body froze. “YOU HAD THE GALL TO BE ALIVE FOR EIGHT YEARS WITHOUT IMFORMING ME.”

Selphie trembled like an overexcited puppy. Seifer pulled his shoulders back. “Hey, sis,” he said.

Selphie shouted and smacked him in the gut. Seifer winced, but not much. She had been trying to hit expressively, not hard. His eyes, though one folded half-shut with a flinch of pain, stayed on Selphie.

“You—you’re—so big,” Selphie whined like a fond grandmother, staring at her tiny hand on Seifer’s stomach.

Seifer cleared his throat. “You are, for sure, absolutely without a doubt, not even a little bigger,” he told her.

“UGH,” said Selphie, drawing her hand back. “It IS him.”

After a second of hesitation, Seifer said, “’Same song, second verse.’”

“’A little bit louder and a whole lot worse,’ this is TERRIBLE!” Selphie whined miserably, and in lieu of doing something like giving him a hug, which Squall had the dark suspicion she actually wanted to do, she bumped the crown of her head into his chest. It could not be in any way construed as a normal way for a SeeD to treat a prisoner.

“Squall, why is his nose broken,” asked Irvine as he shoved his car door shut behind him. “His nose was not broken when I left him.”

Squall raised his eyebrows. Oh, yeah. “Resisting.”

“Resisting what—”

“Healing,” Squall clarified, and tried to strong-arm Selphie away from Seifer without letting go of him himself. Seifer wasn’t causing any trouble (in the moment), but Selphie was like a sleeping cat.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Irvine, walking over to the mess. The first thing he did was pull Selphie away from Seifer; it was suddenly easy for the sniper to move her. He then did a little maneuver that he did all the time and Squall just fucking hated—he pointed a finger-gun at Seifer’s face with his off-hand, made a clicking noise with his tongue, toggled his thumb like he was cocking a safety, and ‘shot’ a Cure into Seifer’s face. (Squall had, unfortunately, witnessed people who thought this fucking move was ‘cool’ or ‘funny.’ He would describe the experience more like ‘agonizing second-hand embarrassment’ himself.) Seifer instinctually flinched, then furrowed his brow as the light Cure settled on his face and pushed back the swelling bruises. That wouldn’t exactly reset the bone, but he looked less like hell and the pain should have dulled. Not that he had been expressing much pain.

“Look, we don’t usually let him do this kind of thing alone, he’s a little bit of an… eccentric officer, does his own thing, kind of hard to control, we’re sorry about him,” he said, as if he were introducing Squall to a citizen. “I can just take you off of his hands—”

“Do not Good Cop me, Kinneas,” Seifer interrupted before Squall could spit out something in response to the quick and punchy fear he felt in his gut at the suggestion.

“I wasn’t Good Copping,” Irvine protested.

“He just straight-up IS the good cop,” Selphie sighed with some frustration as she leaned back against Irvine’s right arm. “Just a… just a solid nice guy.”

“I have a double-digit confirmed kill count,” Irvine said defensively. “I’m just better than Squall, is all. No pitching green recruits right out of the second-story—”

“Shut up,” said squall. Irvine opened his mouth, but Selphie, who looked over his shoulder and saw what Squall saw, elbowed him sharply in the gut to be quiet.

A woman in a nightgown, with a shawl pulled across her thin shoulders, had walked out of her house and was hurrying across the night to the convoy of quietly humming cars. She was almost certainly a civilian resident of Winhill. Her steps were quick and nervous and her eyes flickered from person to person without resting. Irvine grinned and (no doubt) got ready to good-cop her—before he could say anything, though, the woman’s eyes landed on Seifer, and untrained, unprepared, just recently roused form sleep, she completely failed to act like she didn’t recognize him. Her eyes got wide, her feet stopped, she turned her approach so that she wouldn’t be facing him and too quickly looked away form him. By all rights, they shouldn’t have acknowledged that either, but it was so obvious that Squall and Selphie quickly glanced at each other, in tandem, eyebrows raised.

“What’s the trouble?” asked the woman, completely jumping over ‘what brings you folks by so late?’ There had been too much trouble lately and they so clearly brought more; it would have been ridiculous for her to pretend otherwise. Her voce gave her away as younger than she looked—either freshly married or still in her father’s house.

“No trouble,” said Squall evenly. “Squall Leonhart, SeeD A-Rank Operative. We’re from Garden. We need to use your radio station.”

She accidentally snapped a look at Seifer again, clutched captive in the curve of Squall’s hand, and quickly corrected herself. For his part, he didn’t flinch, no matter how badly the civilian gave the game away. “It’s—it’s out,” she said, “I think.”

“It’s out?”

“Well—I don’t know much about this kinds of things—I heard—The men said it’s not been working right for quite a while.”

“Lots of property damage,” Irvine said, giving her a gentle out.

“Well, you’re in luck,” said Selphie cheerfully, taking on casual step toward the woman. “Selphie Tilmitt, also SeeD Rank A, but subtly better than Squall in a way which is hard to define. I’m pretty good with hardware—maybe I can get the radio talking again.”

Squall saw her hesitate around the word ‘no.’ She couldn’t think of a plausible excuse. Nervously, she looked back over her shoulder at the town. “Let me get my husband, please,” she said.

“Of course,” said Squall.

She ran back down the way to her house, and Squall took a moment to peek around town. Small, but scattered, to account for the hills and cliffs that made up the varied, rocky terrain. The small homes were nonetheless tall, usually three-stories and skinny, made solidly of wood in an old style that braced plank by plank at tight angles to reinforce theirselves. Easily defendable to home fighters—Squall hoped they weren’t TOO radicalized. He looked back at the troops he had with him; he stared momentarily at Seifer, who raised a practiced casual eyebrow that just gave nothing away. Nothing for it—two groups, one to stay with the cars and one to get to the radio tower and contact Garden. “Selphie, Lori, Andrew, with me and Almasy,” he decided, “We’ll go to the station and the locals can meet us there, if they care to.”

“You think it’s actually down?” Selphie asked.

“No. But in case it is, can you really fix it?”

“Depends,” she answered definitively. “The kinds of problems a radio box CAN have are pretty varied. But the longer we dally, the more of a change the box had of just suddenly developing a serious condition we call the ‘hit with a sledgehammer to protect sensitive data’ bug.” She leaned up, pecked Irvine on the cheek, and turned around to face the way forward. “City center, you think?”

“Highest point,” Squall guessed. “If not, best place to find out.”

“Squall, Irvine interrupted, “You don’t have to take Almasy—”

“No,” Squall silenced him immediately, and tugged on Seifer’s hand to get walking.

—

Winhill looked lie someone else’s gentler, more beautiful reality. The lace curtain of stars in the sky drifted low above the gabled roofs, hatched with straw and reeds and growing with green, over wooden window-boxes spilling with ivory jessamine and violet-yellow black-eyed susans and white-pink calibrachoa, over the garlic and lily-bulbed wooden doorframes with their clean painted white lintels. Gladioluses and day lilies and irises all speared from the ground in such profusion that some pierced between the cobblestones that made up the curving roads and spilled in patches down the scraggly cliffs. The moon was almost full and hung low in the lace of the stars like a glimmering pendant, the air that a cool breeze picked up from the slits in the intertwined leaves was sharp, green, and buoyant, climbing up the paths of the sweet-scented hill. Though it was all, technically, a town, the space between houses were untamed verdant, vines climbing on ferns climbing on buttercups and moss, thicker that the eye could see through, making the space between each quaint house dark. And since it was night, monsters—-little gossamer-winger, spine-tailed beasts—nestled in the profuse greenery, even slept, heads on their paws, little pieces on the green velvet plush of the showpiece little town.

Unreal. Squall didn’t like it. Seifer didn’t have anything to say, suddenly; the other SeeDs were silent, trained to be more cautious, quiet, and alert in new territory.

He does know something that you should know, said Shiva suddenly, her voice hissed as if it came on the rising cold wind.

You’re more curious about it than I am, Squall noted with almost as much ice.

He clearly has access to memories that you do not have access to—nor I, though I have even made myself space in your mind/spirit for myself, she said, implying Squall’s ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ at once to suggest some kind of roomy middle-ground a God could occupy. You heard him even recite a few.

Or he has ready lies.

He must be a complicated man! You’ve complained about his over-honesty and forthrightness several times.

Squall did not want to swear at her, he found it disrespectful and an embarrassing breach in his composure, but he did anyway, since there was almost no border between her space and his impulses. She laughed; his anger always made her laugh. I didn’t know you back then—she continued—I can recall things you’ve seen for you since we first made our pact, when you were ##, but as you lose the things that came before, they slip from my mind too. Sometimes, if I dig deep into your mind/spirit, I can find them again, but since that time you seized a little, I haven’t wanted to reach so far again.

What is it you’re so curious about? He asked with honest confusion.

I am still curious about you, dear one, she said, gently-teasingly, a prickle of ice behind his ear. You are my fun in this generation—and my concern. You’re no longer quite like the other humans—and you never were, not with your predisposal for my kind. I do want to do well by you, considering I’ve already meddled with you so much—I do have mistakes to make up for—and besides, I want more like you in this world’s future. How were you predisposed? What alters the crude organs of the human kind to attune them to the divine? I don’t think I’ll learn the cause if I can’t study its origin.

More like him in this world’s future. Squall was especially flattered, which made him especially uncomfortable. You sure about that? There’s a reason Quistis and I both agreed to take ourselves out of the gene pool.

I’m not talking about BREEDING you. That’s immoral, she said, flexing her excellent grasp on human morality. But you are unusually good and handling beings like me, finding us, juncioting us, trading us, drawing and doling our magic like its physical goods—and I do want to know how we get people like you. WE ould much better effect the course of this world in the future if we had stronger connections to hosts.

The concerns of Gods. Shiva saw him like a farmer noticed a perfectly ripe apple tree in his orchard, ahead of the others, and started asking himself questions about the angle of the sunlight, the acidity of the soil, or the depth of the water table so that he might get a better crop next year. That, however, relaxed Squall. It always relaxed him to see things from Shiva’s high perspective, to see himself and his petty problems and the petty people around him as so insignificant.

The problem is that I can’t risk him getting into my head, Squall reminded her, unable to not be vulnerable, reflecting images of Seifer’s clutching hands, his hands in his hair, a dirty shimmering street, of Seifer’s funeral, cleaning out his room, crying alone in the bathroom behind the door he locked to keep Quistis out, being shot, his head being cut open, blood and fire magic and soft green cures, all shuffled rapidly in his mind’s eye. You know that I—he gets so far inside me—weakness—well, I have a hard time of keeping steady—

The instability, she sighed, her consciousness tossing restlessly from shoulder to shoulder, as if she were tapping her little piece on the board between two crooked fingers. All of that—stuff—your mind does. I do hope that isn’t a symptom of being good at Gods,

Good at Gods, bad at humans, Squall immediately replied. Shive stubbornly disagreed, a flick of of incicle-tip jumping down the front of his right ribs, lower, then lower, snap—snap—snap. Squall suddenly tuned back in to the world around him when he saw that some part of his conversation with Shiva, which should have all been invisible and inaudible, had made Seifer look at him. That meant he had reacted—or even responded to something, out loud.

“What,” Squall snapped.

“You were l—” Seifer reassessed and interrupted himself. “Come on, all I did was look at you.”

“Y’all, I think this is the place,” Selphie said quickly.

—

((And that, to quote, appears to be all that's in the book. After this, Selphie was going to fix the radio station, they were going to connect with Beatrice and receive the shocking news that Deling had retreated to Esthar because the capital had been overrun with rebels. Their mission is now to bring captive Seifer across the sea to Esthar... it was going to be on that boat that a lot of the relationship progress was made.))

—

Note I Intended To Post When I Finished This Chapter:

PROUD to point out that this chapter contains perhaps 20 seconds of actual flirting… it ain’t much but it’s better than the rest of them

RETURN OF THE NOTES, OKAY, so I did set this precedent where I use character from other FF games as NPCs when I need a temporary character because it’s more fun than just making up a name, but I struggled for ages to think of a character that I could made a SeeD. I thought of Locke Cole because he’s a shifty lil thief, he does espionage (navigating him around the back alleys of a map I had already travelled to rescue other party members was some of the best fun I had playing FF6) and does morally gray things, but he’s a rebel against the system, not part of the system, so it didn’t fit right. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that the main party in almost every single FF game are rebels against the system and FF8 is a huge stand out in having a party that happily contributes. I just. All these other main parties are close-knit but heterogenous bands of antifacist guerilla fighters, and then there’s, the eight game, where they love their mothership? There just isn’t a great parallel in other FF parties, FFXV and its homogenous bro party I guess would be the closest, but. Just but I guess. Normal FFs full of chads who fight the power, whereas FF8, where was I going with this. Anyway, I went with Locke just because he felt like someone who could shut up for the ensuing scene

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Assorted Notes

Since I never finished this poor thing, I figure the least I can do is gather the notes I made about plans and potential futures for this story. They're rough, they contradict each other, there are plot holes; they're something.

—

Approximate schedule of events?

-Winhill, they know Seifer there, Squall is a dick

-Finally get into contact with Galbadia, Beatrix answers

-Deling has fled for Esthar. We have to go to Esthar. Seifer is very understandably triumphant. Squall is deadset on ‘handing over a man he loves to a man he hates.’ (Punishment was brought back with Beatrix but then given to Garden when Xu showed up to talk to Deling directly. Garden is still out but no one in Deling knows where) 

-Boat things. Scene with Rin on the water. Squall realized Seifer could escape/be rescued by Ulti any time, takes off cuffs, has a breakdown. Actually land way to the South because we’ve never been here before, in the monument wilderness.

-actually?.... To stick with my original vision, I could see the first sex scene being here. That means it can happen right before he meets back up with Q, it makes sense for Seifer to cause a scene directly after getting off the boat

(ok listen Squall told Seifer he was ace 15 years ago during a stage and Seifer has taken it as gospel since….) 

-When we do eventually get to Esthar, it’s also under sorceress command of some kind, I think. Lunatic Pandora is Just There. Quistis has been up to her neck since she fucking got here. 

-Laguna is still with Quistis, not under mind control. Learns about situation in Esthar, Q has to debrief even though its obvious something’s wrong. Gets him alone and he confesses. (you didn’t wash off before coming to me?? Get in the shower) LISTEN TO THIS, Quistis and Squall both confessed they were Bi to each other like eight years ago and Squall forgot because so much Trauma. Quistis told him he was Bi and he agreed. He doesn’t remember this until Q is like ‘I TOLD you you were Bi, you didn’t know but you agreed when I told you’ and he’s like ‘oh yeah, that did happen’ and she’s like ‘do you remember that I’m bi???’ and he’s like ‘yes absolutely would never forget important things you tell me’

-Shit Happens in Esthar and this is where Squall’s connection to GF fully cracks and they just slip away from him, because he has pushed their use too hard. He’s desperate then and this could just barely lead him to willingness to accept Seifer’s plans. Also I should establish  plot here lol 

There could possibly be back and forth here, ie meet with Q, run after Seifer, first sex scene, run back to Q, Seifer convinces Squall to leave outside his window. A parallel to his memory, when he let Seifer run away himself. “Make me” (come back with you). What i don’t like about that is it feels like he leaves Q though hopefully i could negate that sense in the text bc taking her along really dilutes it. Probably she runs back to Garden after this (with Laguna, who isn’t safe) and he finally sees her again there. 

-Seifer convinces him to come back to the orphanage. That's where they meet Rinoa, who has been clutching Edea’s grave, as that spare patch of dirt keeps her herself. (Seifer convinced her to wait there and let him convince Squall on his own though she said it was stupid.) After that they are able to compel him to travel Home and take up Hyne because he’s so lost after losing his GF. 

-probably the best solution is that Hyne spirit is what’s keeping her in control at the prison. It’s strong enough, Ulti has to bow to it. Also explains interference with GFs.(really torn on what it LOOKS like. Should be bone/organ, since it’s inside the skin. Link the wiki page on intro chapter). Ulti knows that Hyne will be able to control her but also knows that when he has consciousness he won’t want ot stop her from world conquest, he’ll help her, so she’s honestly less afraid of an autonomous Hyne than his power-negating bones.

-The only other scene i know i’d like to do after this is him returning to Garden and having to fight his way out because……. Hyne is a fucking sorceror, dumbass. A final fucking snap on his mental state leads to complete collapse : ) thinking of having Hyne slowly take over until Seifer finally realizes neither of these are the people he loves, the soul-merge didn’t heal them, it made them disappear. Ulti says ‘lol go try and fix it’ and he says ‘no, its ‘okay, let’s try!’ you bad actress’

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Far-Future Content

Here is a short, unfinished look at me messing around with a potential far-future of the fic, one in which somehow, everyone survives all of this. It was not the only potential future, but it was fun to mess around with a bit.

—

“Completely harmless,” Seifer promised, giving Squall what was essentially a few whacks on the shoulder to prove his point.

Now, here’s something Squall had not in a million years expected—they basically divided the globe between them on who was considered a mass murderer in popular conception where. Seifer, being an infamous underground rat King, was regarded appropriately as such in a lot of places, especially central Galbadia, the North, and Balamb. But most of Esthar—and ALL of Trabia—wanted nothing to do with Squall. And Fisherman’s Horizon, save him from Fisherman’s Horizon. He was more offended that they had chosen a favorite war criminal than by the fact that they had chosen Seifer.

Anyway, the fine scientists of the Luncatic Pandora Research Center were not buying that he was ‘totally harmless’ now, no matter how he grit his teeth and bore it through Seifer whacking his shoudlerblade.

--

Squall was. A little embarrassed that he could pull his strings like this. He shouldn’t have been; after all, no one KNEW him like Seifer did or, honestly, had ever. Almost a whole lifetime of knowing him intimately and spades of experience between the two of them with this sort of thing. But the reason why it shouldn’t have been embarrassing was the reason it was embarrassing. He asked himself, Goddess, can he still get me like this? And then, trying his damndest to keep a dignified face, he accepted Seifer’s hand and let himself be pulled forward.

The dismount onto bed was not as graceful as it could have been, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Once he had a grip on him, Seifer smiled and tugged him forward harshly. Squall—mostly—went with it, parting his thighs so that he could straddle him, which encouraged him to lay further back. Still, once Squall was on him, he grabbed Seifer’s wrist and pulled back, bringing it back to his side like a horse’s bridle.

Seifer made an almost inaudible huff of surprise when Squall pulled his arm back. He smiled; of course he liked that. He always whined in public about how rough Squall was, but in private, he fired up to put up easier and faster than Squall did.

(Shiva’s ice rattled through his ribs as she disappeared, with the faintest chill chuckle. She was getting quicker at recognizing when argumentation turned into foreplay, which was… good? He never expected to be teaching Gods about sex, but he should have thought of that before he became GF master.)

“Do you have a plan in mind, or were you just feeling lonely down there?” Squall asked him icily.

(Seifer loved the icy haughtiness, and they both knew it.) “Just felt a little cold,” he lied obviously. Squall could feel through both of their clothes that he felt hot. He would say that he had the ‘pleasure’ now of knowing that Seifer got fucking demanding morning wood, but, as some of his memories started blinking back open, he is… fairly sure he knew that a long time ago, actually, but didn’t give a shit at the time.

Squall shifted so that he was sitting a little more comfortably on his hips. Seifer twitched a little, but mostly masked his reaction. “Where’s your wife?” he asked as though the question was unrelated.

“Uh, maybe busy with your partner?” Touche. And honestly, he was starting to wonder. (Or, Selphie was starting to wonder for him, by making her ‘why quads might be right for you’ case almost daily and with impressive refinements in delivery and efficiency every time.) “Woke up alone this morning. Didn’t get all of these partners to end up in that sorry state.”

What could Squall say, exactly? He had walked in here on purpose when he saw the door ajar, and he had honestly expected to see no one in here, and was just walking into Seifer’s empty bedroom for weird and personal reasons (like staring at the blank space and making double extra sure he thought it was all real, while Shiva reminded him of the facts of reality and his selfhood that he knew for sure, but in Seifer’s bedroom, no big deal, normal). He had actually woken the still half-slumbering man up, and, well.

“I know for a fact you used to be excellent at handling yourself.”

“No thanks to you! I swear you were there half the time.”

“I was, and I ignored you.”

It’s amazing how many come-ons, subtle and shockingly unsubtle, he missed. Hard boiled brain chemistry will do that for you. Seifer smiled, the particular smile that grew like a fungus on his face when he was about to say something stupid. “You could ignore me like that all day, baby, I’d like it.”

“You say that, but I know for a fact that you’d suddenly start asking for me to insult you or something halfway through.”

“Honestly?” He said, his pale blue eyes vacantly staring at the ceiling for a second. “You just sitting across the room, talking me down. Mm. Actually, maybe.”

For all things good. Squall momentarily closed his eyes and opened them with an annoyed flutter. “We are too old for this.”

“No fucking way. The older you get, the more appropriate it is to stop giving a shit and get more fetish-y. Hey, speaking of,”

Squall was doing his best, but the terrible segue was too much. He broke and laughed, inaudibly, nothing more than his mouth opening with a short smile and his chest shaking. Seifer caught it, and grinned. “What, asshole.”

“Pff. Speaking of, how subby are you feeling today?”

Squall raised his eyebrows. While technically a switch (like everyone else in this god-forsaken house), he basically saved showing his stomach for fancy occasions. He liked it… fine. It could be nice, depending on the build-up. This wasn’t it. “At barely eight a.m.? If by ‘subby’ you mean ‘willing to be physically on bottom,’” He thought. “Maybe.”

Seifer laughed. His eyes crinkled up into bright little slits and he showed his teeth. Squall’s heart thudded. “Always the man.”

Squall leaned forward a little and spoke with a softness he all but reserved for his incredible asshole. “Not always.”

Seifer smiled in response. He rolled his head purposefully back onto his pillow, and gently tugged his arm back so that he could lay them down on either side of his head. “If I’m really good today, maybe you’ll be feeling it a little more tonight?”

Squall raised his eyebrows and considered the starting-to-be-alluring man underneath him. His soft actions and fighting words were at a dangerous contrast with each other that hit like a bullet every time. It reminded him—pleasantly—of some sore hours of his life, of Seifer speaking to him with kindness and harshness, making him come to terms with himself. “Really into this today, huh? What happened, did you have a weird dream?”

Wrong thing to say to a man with PTSD comparable to his own, but he didn’t take it the wrong way. He rolled his head a little. “I just got something in my head.”

Evasive. Why? Squall was going to get it out of him anyway. He leaned forward, putting one hand on the right side of Seifer’s head. “If you say that I did something completely normal yesterday and you were thinking some perverted shit again.”

Seifer cracked up. Bulls-eye. “Man! I love you, down to the rotten core of your maggot-infested heart, but romantic gestures are fucking wasted on you.”

Good. “I might not know what romance is, but I don’t think it’s getting stiff while watching me clean a gun and then trying to weasel me into gunplay three days later after a series of complicated efforts circling around the topic.”

“You say that like you don’t fucking love gunplay.”

Squall willed his body to not do anything. Of course he fucking did, and he hates that Seifer got to see him realize he fucking loved it. It just had never occurred to him to bring a gun to bed before he fell in with this rotten bastard, because the concept was insane. But YOU keep your head when the guy who swore to kill you several times despite the secret passion he bore for you wraps his mouth around the head of a pistol. “You make this way too complicated.”

“Squall, almost every time you get off, I’m shocked at the exact thing it was that pushed you over the edge. It is literally never what I expect.”

“What I mean is,” said Squall, leaning back away from his face, untouched, “Who builds up to a specific act for days, you maniac?”

Seifer tilted a little forward himself, suggestively following him up. “You know how I plan,” he said, with the glimmer of the rebel butcher dancing in the bottom of his eyes. Squall swallowed. “I’ve planned circles around you plenty of times, it just gets to be fun for us both now.”

Squall scoffed at him. Sadly, that was how Seifer knew he was getting to him. “How do you even know you’ll still be feeling like it by tonight?” After all, as much as Squall only bottomed so often, that meant ipso facto, Seifer only topped him so often. He could probably get more if he wanted more, honestly.

Seifer made a little considering noise, and then, he reached forward to push at Squall. Squall, who loved a bit of pushing around, leaned back, and was surprised when Seifer just got off the bed and stretched his arms above his head. “Well, I can start by making sure that I’m not fucked out before then!”

  Squall watched him start walking off with increasing surprise and derision. “That’s exactly what I mean about putting a little too much effort into sex for three days from now,” he said.

“Bragging about not putting effort in is not the flex you think it is!” Seifer told him, turning so that he could watch Squall as he walked backward out of the room. “And Squall?”

“What.”

“I didn’t say three days from now,” he said, “I said tonight.” He kept his eyes on him as he backed out fo the room, being purposefully, but effectively, rakish with his parting glance.

Squall stared after he left. He shook his head and scoffed at the empty air.

He was absolutely going to go along with it. He knew that already. Sure, he preferred to be on top, but there was nothing like Seifer’s infuriating confidence.

Still, he was going to do everything in his power to act like he wasn’t even considering it. Ignoring him, one might say. Hell, he might even get a little insulting. Whatever it took to actually get pushed into it, that was good by him.

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