Of the Lion and the Knight

Disclaimer: Characters of FFVIII property of Square Enix; I don't own them, but I do own the plot of this fic, not that I'm making any profit from this story, yadda yadda yadda. Please don’t sue - I’m penniless, unless you think the contents of my fridge are worth a legal wrangle... -_-;

Warning: This chapter is rated R for language.

A/N: As in the prolog, the first three parts of this chapter are the ramblings of our little lion, from his POV. The rest takes up in the third-person, which I find ten times easier to write with, and most times, a heck of a lot more pretty. It makes a nice break from first-person to switch, and vice versa, I think.

Just a reminder, the prolog takes place in the present, and subsequent chapters are working up to it, and so took place previous to the prolog.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter One: Words Missing Meaning

If I’d wanted not to make a scene, I should have just used the front door. As it was, staggering into the sudden, cool darkness of the small lobby beyond the side-door caused the burned-on sky blue of the blazing day outside to stick to my vision – and a web of grubby old twine-nets, crisped kelp and lures above the door to stick to my head. I walked straight into it, passed a gloved hand up to my face in surprise, and brought the whole lot crashing down behind me, along with a stack of rods propped neatly up next to the door-frame. Despite being a small-ish pile of junk, it couldn’t have made more noise.

I stopped, grimaced… attempted to remove a large piece of netting strung with dried bits of something that had fallen over my face and hung there, with a sheepish thumb and forefinger. The hotel owner had been barely six feet away the whole time – a bag of garbage clutched in one hand, riveted to the spot… and now glaring at me with eyes as wide as a blobra’s, and twice as unfriendly. I realised someone close by was clapping, but it wasn’t the owner.

“Uh…”

The owner’s eyes suddenly lit up and he almost dropped the trash.

“Squall?” he exclaimed, and none too happy. “Last time you showed up here it was a war-zone - fighting with Galbadian soldiers, no less! Did you see the damage done to my wife’s carpet, eh? Or my window-shutters? All the work I put into this place… why they let you kids play with all that bloody hocus-pocus nonsense is beyond me – it’s ridiculous!”

I couldn’t say much for myself. I expected I looked ridiculous enough without trying to explain that the only real damage had been caused by Fujin’s rage… and Raijin’s bolting out of the hotel like a wild boar on fire after he’d had enough.

Well, you wanted a nice breeze to name your place after, didn’t you? I thought, remembering the unique manifestation of Balamb’s first-ever indoor tornado… but thought better of sharing.

“Why the Dincht boy keeps ruffian friends like you, I’ll never know,” he went on, shaking his head. “‘So that’s what they teach up at that Garden, eh?’ I said to myself. Wanton destruction of property and street punch-ups, eh? That thing almost crushed my hotel when it passed over, as well - the whole town, in fact!”

“…Sorry, I guess,” I said awkwardly. “We weren’t looking for a fight. The Galbadians -”

“Strange how fights always come looking for you,” he interrupted stroppily. “And those Galbadians aren’t much better, either - marching in here and cordoning everything off, searching houses... was like martial law’d been declared…”

I figured words wouldn’t get me anywhere – though I did wonder what the owner would’ve thought if I’d told him his hotel, himself, and his wife’s precious carpet wouldn’t even exist if it hadn’t been for ‘that Garden’. I started picking up the fallen debris and stacking it back up against the door - once I’d plucked the unsavoury mesh off my head and ruffled my tangles out. The owner watched me beadily as he carried on jabbering about ‘the youth of today’, and I wondered what else might’ve happened for such a mellow guy to have gotten such a large bug up his ass.

And then I thought of Seifer.

It was kind of funny, really. I wondered if the owner had any clue just who it was who’d come over to stand and watch with that insufferable smirk plastered on his face.

“Seifer…” I began.

“Oh, so now you’re hanging out with him, too?” the owner asked him, comically aghast, jerking an irate thumb at me. “You’re both as bad as one another, you are. What’s next? Don’t get ‘ny ideas about brawling in my hall or you’re out, you hear me? All three of you.”

“Yes sir,” Seifer drawled, sketching a mock salute so incredibly sarcastic I thought even the owner would notice - but he didn’t. Apparently he hadn’t cottoned on to Seifer’s situation… or rather, what it had been; he’d known us both as kids though, rented out his rods when we’d gone fishing down at the pier… and almost everyone in Balamb knew how Seifer and I would always be the ones to end up fighting in the street or at the harbour, and being dragged back to Garden’s Disciplinary Room… and how many rods he’d lost to our antics was anyone’s guess. He wandered off, muttering to himself, turning his head once or twice to look at us, hawk-like. Seifer folded his arms.

“Nice going,” he sniffed, apparently not amused.

“Glad you think so.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you trying to bring attention to me? Don’t think I have enough problems as it is?”

I rose up and dusted myself off, looked him squarely in the eye, noticing for the first time he looked almost… urgent. I also noticed I had completely forgotten what was running in my mind to say once I’d caught him up.

“You better not be thinkin’ of staying here as well,” he went on. “That’ll have him and everyone talking, and you know it.”

“What’s the big deal?” I shrugged. “He obviously doesn’t know about – anything,” I added, my voice trailing off into a conspiratorial murmur. Bizarrely, it now appeared that we were whispering to each other, and the owner glared distantly from the other end of the hall in our direction.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Seifer shot darkly, checking over his shoulder as if for imagined eavesdroppers.

“Are you… on the run?” I asked after a moment, feeling the question rather blunt and stupid-sounding as it tumbled out of my mouth – but vindicated nonetheless. I’d assumed in Balamb even a Sorceress could’ve stayed invisible… with the hybrid of small-town and country detachment, anyone could disappear if they picked the right places to hang out and did nothing unusual. Zell was only a local legend because his mother was - and, of course, for the fact he was so loud. Dangling off the car rental sign at the town gate and hooting like a rooster did tend to attract attention.

Garden cadets and SeeDs were disadvantaged, though – Balamb, forgetful as it was, had difficulty forgetting us.

“Put it this way, Mr. Hero…” he rejoined, leaning over to emphasize the words, “I don’t wanna be seen within a hundred yards of you. Do you know what kinda price is on my head? Huh?”

“…No…”

“More than my life’s worth, that’s what. So do me a favour and get the hell outta here, Leonhart. The last thing I need is you - or Chicken,” (and here he narrowed his eyes as if almost positive his pet name for a certain someone was bad luck) “to give Them the heads-up.”

“’Them?’”

“The friggin’ Galbadian army,” he hissed. “Who else?”

The owner had finally stopped staring at us and gone back to his duties at the desk, but an abrupt silence appeared to have fallen in the room, and clung there, as if it were listening. I could still hear the gulls wheedling overhead from outside in the gloomy corner, but all my thoughts from out there had been emptied.

Galbadian army? I reflected briefly. So they’re making a scapegoat of him? Even after he’d commanded them? Was one of them…?

Or was he ever one of them?

Wasn’t he just Ultimecia’s -

Not that I knew much of what had happened after time compression had swallowed the Lunatic Pandora, and the present had melted away… for anyone but us. Seifer had obviously got away somehow, from both the compression and the Galbadians, to end up here – though it seemed a little much to be demanding his head as -

“…You’re a war criminal?”

I suddenly recalled what had happened with Norg, and how he’d quickly decided to hand us SeeDs over to the enemy in some semblance of alliance to Edea. It hadn’t been a hard decision for him to make, considering we’d lived and trained at Garden all our lives, and only acted under orders - he’d been happy enough to make us into his little peace offering… in about ten seconds flat.

‘I believe the technical term is a ‘patsy’,” he growled, more incensed by the word, I imagined, than the fact. I didn’t quite think his paranoia was merited just yet, though…after all, I’d done the political criminal thing myself, reminded sharply of the torture room at the prison - and of Seifer pointing his Hyperion at me with those wild, crazed eyes. They didn’t seem nearly as crazed any more, but I couldn’t suppress a scowl at the memory. At the pain.

I perceived him scowling back.

“Are you scared?” I asked, brusquely. That deepened his scowl a shade or two. “Because from what I remember, prison’s a gas.”

“What are you on about?” he demanded suspiciously, and if it was possible for his posture to stiffen up any more in agitation, he’d have looked like a torama ready to pounce. Almost as if he expected I’d run straight out into the street shouting about how I’d found him, he fixed me with his most intimidating gaze, stopping just short of grabbing me by the collar, I think.

I didn’t shrink away.

“You don’t remember?” I continued. “You, kicking me senseless, having me zapped on a rack three or four hours at a time? Thought it would’ve been the highlight of your day.”

Surprised at the vehemence of my own words, and the way I said them – till now I’d barely thought back to our break-out from the desert, to be honest – I was even more surprised at his reaction.

“What’re you saying, Leonheart? I’ve had enough mind games for one lifetime.” He looked more perplexed than angry.

“So it wasn’t you?” I pressed – and not entirely sure I wanted to know the answer, but fatally curious anyway. What had Ultimecia done to him that day in Timber, to convince him to walk through the wall with her, anyway? What had she made him feel that quite clearly transformed his fear into obedience? Even back then, shackled as I was to that machine, panting dazedly between jolts of pure electrical agony, I’d wondered… if it was really him watching me with thrilled, slitted eyes and not her. Seifer had been a bully, an attention-seeker, spiteful and vindictive, even… but a torturer? A sadist? A monster?

I’d never fully believed it.

Maybe he’d been a good choice for the job, because he definitely had a mean streak; but even he’d consider himself above base torture, I felt. His ‘Romantic Dream’ hadn’t been that low.

Though what he’d been prepared to do to get it was something else…

I found he was regarding me now with a mixture of frustration and rising gall.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

...Weird.

“…Nothing.”

It wasn’t really the time or the place for this, after all. But would there ever be a better one?

At this rate – never.

And what about what I’d wanted to tell him earlier, about the orphanage, and Edea, and -

But he only glowered back at me. Perhaps he thought I was mocking him, winding him up; I was just wasting my breath, probably. Seifer never listened to me. What’d possessed me to think he could manage it now? ‘At each other’s throats’ was usually how our conversations ended, or else in icy silence, and I felt somehow as though I’d been through enough lately without needing to chase arguments with him. I looked past him to the empty counter, then back at the brazen, questioning leer. I straightened up a bit.

“It’s… fine,” I smiled, without sentiment; turning to leave the way I’d come, feeling livid green eyes bury themselves in my back like knives.

*

“Hold up, Squall,” a voice barked, not far behind. It slowed but didn’t stop my determined trudge back toward the harbour, though it sent a faint shiver down my back, and a prickling of tiny hairs on the neck. No matter how many times I heard that phrase, and in that voice, I could never repress the bristling it goaded… because for as long as I could remember, it had always preceded some kind of trouble.

…When I was young, I had run away whenever I heard it. As I grew older, I learned to stop. And later, I’d ignored it. But no matter what I did, I always knew what was coming next, as sure as rain fell, birds flew, and punches hurt afterwards.

This time, though… I couldn’t decide whether to stop for the last time, or just keep going. It wasn’t my problem any more, I reminded myself coolly.

…And that was a nice feeling after all the recent ones.

The scorching sun in my face was suddenly replaced with a large shadow, and it had jogged to get there.

“Yeah, blank me out after lecturing me on it,” it spat, in Seifer’s morose grumble. I looked up, taking care to put some indifference in my face… and a little displeasure, too. I was trying not to care, and it was working; the day still shimmered a tranquil, dreamy quality, not having much in common with my latest reality at all… rendering me somewhat numb.

He hesitated a moment, put a hand to his temple as if fishing for a string of words that would equal his thoughts in the least time and effort. “Look,” he started, before fixing me with cautious consideration. “I don’t remember much - about what happened, and why, all right? Fujin and Raijin told me after they found me, but – ” and then he shrugged - “I don’t even remember that ‘Lunatic Pandora’ thing… or what I did to Rinoa.”

Rinoa…

Something in the way he said it made me meet his eyes, the black cores of those jade-green orbs, glass-hard, my own straying after a moment to the tiny emerald motes embedded within the iris, like flecks of prase. They betrayed nothing of his soul, but I sensed there something else… something I couldn’t quite read, wasn’t sure if I’d seen before – but nonetheless present. We must have stared at each other for a full thirty seconds or so, before I broke away.

“Rinoa’s fine,” I said hoarsely, inexplicably bemused, as if I’d just sat through a swift slideshow of all the feelings and questions the matter conjured on the inside of my mind, feeling all of them rushing to fill my awareness, competing for dominance. And I’d stood there wondering, questioning all the while…if he was telling the truth, if he still cared about Rinoa, if he loved her, if he knew…

…and not knowing how I should even begin reacting to them. If I should even feel involved at all. After all, he was Rinoa’s…

Nope, didn’t wanna go there.

“That’s okay. Edea didn’t remember much either,” I answered flatly; once I realised he was waiting, waiting for some kind of acceptance of what appeared to be... a sort of rambling apology.

Apology? Well, damn.

“…Who?”

“The Sorceress. The first Sorceress that was possessed by Ultimecia,” I urged, but he only blinked once at me, vacantly. I realised Fujin and Raijin had probably been clueless as to the real goings on as well, and... well, Seifer - like me - had forgotten who Edea was. “Never mind, it’s not that important, now it’s over.”

“Not for me it isn’t,” he added quickly, and with some heat (it still surprised me how fast he could switch on the temper). “Being hunted for something I don’t even know if I did.”

I had to admit, I believed him; and the eyes tell you some things words never can. Neither Edea, nor Rinoa seemed fully to remember what happened the moment Ultimecia’s consciousness touched their own. Rinoa had told me that at first it’d felt a like a dream, a dream of being awake, but with no strength; simply seeing what her eyes were made to look at, doing what her body was forced to do... and the longer it had gone on, the more of her own memory had slipped away as her resistance to the grip on her mind waned. Later though, she said - she’d lost herself completely in a white space of nothingness she thought had been death… or the Beyond. She’d talked and talked in a anxious voice about how terrifying it had been, how the light had been so painful, shining through her, baring everything in her mind and body to some unseen and unknown scrutiny. As though something was dissecting her very soul…

She’d been so scared. Even after, when everything was all right.

My thoughts turned back to Seifer, still eyeing me emptily.

“You don’t remember anything at all? Not even Timber?”

“A bad dream,” he returned tersely. “Something I just woke up from - that’s the only way I could describe it.”

Dream…

“I can tell you what I saw for real, if you want,” I suddenly muttered, but feeling less than enthused; and he only looked away as though it were a pointless thing to suggest.

“You were possessed, Seifer. And you’re not the only one who was. They can’t accuse you of doing something you did while being controlled by someone else.”

“They won’t accuse of me anything,” he retorted huskily, “if they’re just out for some blood. If that’s all they want… that’s all they need.”

I looked away too, to the sea, and the horizon… Garden’s glimmer now nowhere in sight. Probably, I thought, harking back to our ‘trial’ as SeeDs after the pitifully unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Edea. We hadn’t even gotten as far as a courtroom, and our ‘holding cell’ had wound up being a real one in the D-District prison. There never would’ve been any trial, any questions asked, had we not managed to bust out.

“Then I suppose they’ll just have to want it,” I said, heavily. “I don’t think they’ll even bother coming here. Why are you worrying? Afraid we’d lead them here?”

“Garden isn’t exactly inconspicuous.”

“Neither are Galbadian soldiers.”

He smiled vaguely, at a distant rock out in the crashing sea… the one they called the ‘Dragon’s Tooth’, glittering coldly with spray… that as kids we’d always tried to hit with little stones, and always failed. In that moment I felt cold, no hate, no enmity, but so cold; like we were two carven figures on the cliff, staring out at the ocean, waiting for the wind and the waves to eat away the ages till we, too, crumbled away. There were no answers to our grievances, no words that could heal them; our uses overstayed with nothing more to do but fade away, or have others deface us, tear us down, replace us. It seemed the world we knew was gone.

Maybe we exist only to fight.

And then… what then? When there’s no more fighting to be done? Nowhere else to go?

“Do me a favour,” he said quietly, more of an instruction than a request. “Tell Rinoa… ‘I’m sorry’ for me.”

With that, he turned and walked slowly back up the hill; no glance backward, no goodbye.

* *

For the rest of morning I hung around Balamb, watching a few small vessels pass in and out of the harbour for refuelling, the rumble of the afternoon mail train from Timber being the only thing to finally wake me from an impromptu nap on a grassy jut overlooking the waterfront. The day had been so clear I’d been able to make out the comms tower over at Dollet, a tiny, pale gray pinnacle rising distantly to the firmament like a lonely, twisted ruin - dim reminder of what had begun here, and ironically finished with my lying, staring wistfully out into the world from the same spot, wondering in the end if my straying from street to street like a lost dog was how it was supposed to end. By now the sun had passed over and was dipping down toward it, the limb of the arcing moon threatening an early sunset.

I came to get away from Garden, but… when I’m away from it, it’s like the world passes me by. Like I’m not even here, or a part of anything.

…Like I don’t belong anywhere.

And when I’m in Garden, I feel overwhelmed. Especially now, with the future of SeeD uncertain…

But then, where did I belong? If I couldn’t figure that out, I reasoned, I guess I had no right to complain. I’d thought about Seifer for a while, his predicament, the likelihood of Galbadians actually finding – or looking – for him, or just how he knew they were on his tail… not that it was my concern, according to him. Then my mind turned to Rinoa, the curious thing about the dreams…

And finally to Zell’s mother. That wasn’t exactly my business either, but the day was getting old; and despite the twinge of apprehension at the thought of Seifer’s warning, I got up and made my way to the Dincht’s, where I’d agreed to stay and eat.

…The Dincht’s place still seemed to be standing in for town hall and crèche.

A lot of people had stopped by, quite a few along with their kids before dinner was ready and most of them left, save for the mother of one boy, who spent a good half hour trying to drag her fascinated son away from my gunblade; and Zell seemed quieter than usual as I helped him put out chairs and a collapsible table in the living room. Ma Dincht herself seemed little different, no less chatty as she laid a vase of fresh white flowers on the table at the centre of the waiting plates. The boy and his mother stayed to eat as well, and the three kept the silence from the table as the food was whittled away. I didn’t feel much like talking, listening distractedly to the trivial banter, sounding a little too cheerful and carefree as it went; and when Zell’s mother spoke, taking time to gaze at her while I chewed in reserve.

My attention snapped fully back to the talk when the boy’s mother happened to mention Galbadians.

“There’s been a few rumours, but nothing to really go on as usual,” she was sighing.

“I heard the new one isn’t another Deling,” Ma Dincht replied, “but who can tell? It’s not like we haven’t heard it all before. Those generals-turned-presidents never turn out right.”

“It’s been a while since I had any faith in the Galbadian press, anyway. I suppose I only watched it because it was the first live broadcast I caught since before I got married…”

“I don’t agree with any of it, myself. How will it solve anything?”

“Oh who knows what goes on inside their minds?” the boy’s mother snapped, shaking her head and returning thought to her plate. “It’ll take more than that to satisfy people after what happened under the last one.”

Ma Dincht nodded and looked over at Zell, who was quietly eating and looking a million miles away. “Well, that’s over all over now. We’ll just have to hope for the best - Balamb’s always gotten along fine by itself… I don’t see why it can’t just stay that way.”

Promptly, they changed the subject.

An hour or so later, I made an excuse to go to bed, leaving Zell and his mother alone as I climbed the stone steps to his room. A spare mattress and sleeping bag had been laid out for me, and I flopped on to it gratefully.

General Caraway’s the new Galbadian president, I thought. Rinoa’s father… one who asked our help in assassinating the Sorceress. Did he have any idea Rinoa was a Sorceress, too? Was that something she’d gone to tell him, face to face?

I lay awake for a while in the dark, focusing on the tiny slit of illumination from under the door as my thoughts wound this way and that, finally running themselves out of care. And it was then, sinking down and drifting off into oblivion, that I had the first - but by no means the last - of my own ‘dreams’.

* * *

He was in that place again. That awful place that was everywhere and nowhere, all around as far as the eye could see, and forever. His heart seemed to clench in his chest; despair, he remembered miserably, was the meaning of it.

Not this place, it seemed to whisper to him. Please, anywhere but this.

…Utter and total despair. If there was a place he hated with every fiber of his being, that every cell of his body abhorred, this was surely it. Of all the things his mind was willing to forget, why not this place too? Why did he have to keep coming back here?

The wretched landscape stared back emptily, its only answer the soft whine of a hollow wind past his ears, a tuneless dirge racing across cold, lifeless earth and diseased sky, that stretched on and on and on to the end of all hope.

What am I doing here again…?

…Why!?

Standing there, his eyes fell upon a set of footprints in the gently swirling dust, setting out in a stoical line from where his very own boots were placed, fading away into untold distance… and somehow, he just knew where they led. It was pointless: the further he might walk to escape, the more the deceased land would invariably close in and cut him off. This place had no escape, no entrance to come in by, no parallel retreat.

And in that moment, like a vision recalled and suddenly realised, as though he were watching himself from all angles without and within and with absolute prescience of his state, his path… he knew that place for what it really was.

...Hell.

My hell…

My very own.

It was truth; it had to be, the knowledge gripping him with such savagery he could barely draw breath. The place, in its nameless, inescapable desolation, appeared to sense his fear, his loathing, pressing in closer, colder. Famished and abandoned, it seemed not even to enjoy his anguish, or the pleasure of his revulsion… no, could it be that the place hated him more than he hated it? Was it… afraid of him, too?

Hate. He hated it. But still, he didn’t move, wouldn’t submit to the illusion. Something within told him to wait, look deeper. The sick clouds rolled overhead, murky veils of smoke and mist, and between their ragged shapes a sun, aged and sanguine, threw no warmth or hue upon the bitter sight at all.

No. I hate this place.

I don’t want to be here again…!

Refusing to budge from the spot in which he found himself, he closed his eyes, as though he were trying to wish himself away from it. There had to be a way. If he’d just ‘appeared’ there, or the place had materialised around him… there had to be a way back, or a way out, too. He felt somehow this was also truth -

“But yet you know not how to leave it behind.”

A ‘voice’ that seemed to have come from within him awoke without sound, speaking (or was it feeling?) directly into his mind, almost as though it were just another part of his own brain arguing with itself. But the Voice, it was plain, was not of himself. In that noiseless but irrefutable communication, there was meaning beyond his ken, the unmistakeable and unmasked presence of an alien psyche, something… other. He shivered.

“This place is your heart. Where no-one but you is allowed to suffer.”

A second Voice joined the first, but this one had a different feel, a different energy to it… another awareness, crystallised in his senses like a blade of ice.

“Hopeless, just as you wished.”

“Just as you wanted,” added the First.

“Hope is painful,” the Second went on. “Where all things are lost, none can feel pain. Here is a graveyard for your fears.”

“Where lost hope cannot hurt you.”

More Voices seemed to be emerging, unfolding, overlapping and contorting within his consciousness, as though a hidden knell had suddenly summoned from within him a plethora of outspoken ghosts.

“If this is hell, you are its maker...”

“And you alone…”

“Only you can decide…”

“Where will you go, if not here?”

“Where…?”

“I don’t know!” he wanted to declare, but no sound came. The Voices weren’t just questioning but probing, their interest growing in intensity, manifesting like pushing and pulling forces against his startled awareness. “Where else can I go? How can I leave if this is a place I made myself… with no end, no escape?”

“Don’t you want to stay?”

“It’s painful outside. More painful than here.”

“He is… uncertain.”

“Fear. It threatens to break him.”

“Hoping is painful for him. He fears loss above all else.”

“Loss is unavoidable.”

“Loss is inevitable.”

With each assertion, it was as though a weight were being strung upon him, the emotions behind them flashing as real feelings from some faded memory – or another’s, growing, accumulating a sensation of heaviness crushing him down; the burden of emotion these mind-entities were piling upon him told like a physical load upon his frame. He stumbled to his knees.

Burning eyes, tears in the rain.

…Don’t leave.

A safe place; warmth, a caress, a breath mingled with whispered lust.

…Field I can’t find in a summer long dead.

Eyes open, vacant in death.

Can’t bear to look in them...

Pain.

…Blood. Am I bleeding again?

“What do you want?” he tried to ask them, but it came out as a mere croak with the dryness in his throat. The dead world melted away, pierced and then consumed in whole by brilliant lances of shearing light.

…Everything went white.

There was silence absolute.

“Here there is nothing,” echoed the solitary First, after a lengthy peace. “...Not even despair.”

Floating now – for there was no floor nor sky, nor gravity – the young man felt himself become transparent, as vacuous as the place around him. There was nothing to see… nothing to feel, not even when he thought he curled up within himself to shrink away from it, from that all-pervading brightness so intense. But he could sense no limbs, no body of his own; as if all had been stripped away, leaving only total awareness - which, he realised, needed no eyes to know that all around, strange presences were gathered, studying him quietly from an untold distance.

They had no forms or colors… but still, they were there. Like the ravenous chill of frost hungry for warmth to undo its imbalance, the resonance of these things inferred danger, hunger, and they were close, so many of them. Countless many. He perceived them watching… their invisible auras circling slowly, imperceptibly slowly, like the stars of a galaxy – in a void of light. He found he could no longer speak, but his thoughts were naked to them.

“Death? This is not death,” the First answered to his unspoken question. “This is the Nion.”

“Elevation,” another Voice said.

“The Next Level.”

“You do not belong here.”

“You cannot belong here.”

“Your kind is not ready. Your minds are too weak.”

“You will not survive it.”

“It is forbidden.”

The light was growing steadily more painful, but trying to shield himself was impossible. If he still had eyes, the light penetrated their tightly-closed lids; if he had arms flung up to his face, it pierced through them.

“Pain? It is the pain of separation.”

“The candour of mind to mind.”

“Your kind remains unaware of the conduit between all Consciousness… and the border of flesh, trapped as you are.”

“Unable to see. Unable to feel as one.”

“Fatal to the fragile mind.”

“You cannot understand. You must not pass through.”

“This pain will destroy you, unprepared.”

“Where go the Elevated, humans must not follow.”

“Humans, bound forever in the cycle of birth and death…”

“This was their choice.”

“Their Fate has been broken...”

It was hurting him, the light; the very presence of the Voices like an ache inside his wits, but there was nothing he could do. They spilled and clamoured over him, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all speaking at once, their attentions like fingers, grasping and seeking… except it was his mind they were tormenting, not flesh… and he couldn’t protect himself. Didn’t know how he could protect himself from these prying, formless assailants.

“Human minds are brittle.”

“Discrete creatures, made separate from each other, never knowing wholeness, or true oneness.”

“Strong you are, but still human.”

“Still weak.”

“You cannot withstand the Light for long.”

As the pain sharpened to unbearable agony, the First Voice rose suddenly above the rest.

“Enough.”

The whiteness faded, the Voices dissipated… the pain in his mind was gone. It took some time before its absence dawned on him, and his new surroundings sank in.

Floor. There was definitely floor… hard and cold, digging into his shoulder and hip where weight and body had returned. And blackness - because his eyes were firmly shut. Very slowly, he drew himself up from a prone slump into a tremulous crouch, never having felt so weak in all his life, and feeling on the verge of a churning bout of sickness. Even with his eyes open, the impenetrable blackness remained… but at least it wasn’t the Light… or, thank Hyne, that place.

“Where am I?” he thought, though the question seemed to have fallen from his mouth as well; his voice sounded terribly shaky and thin.

The blackness was taciturn, revealing no secrets.

“This is a dream. It has to be.”

“Of course it is.”

Whirling around, the young man recognised the First Voice that had spoken in his head, but this time it had spoken through air, and outside of his mind, cutting through the space clear and sharp, like the ring of crystal on crystal. Still, the blackness was impenetrable; he could see nothing and no-one, not even himself or his extremities as he stumbled about, the only thing of any surety around him being the solid floor beneath his feet.

“Who are you? Where is this?”

“Do you really need to ask?”

That’s right – he knew that voice already; or at least felt he recognised it somehow, something reassuring about it in a strange and indescribable way. Even so, he couldn’t say who it belonged to; he’d forgotten their name or face, but recalled some quality, some feature of it that registered comfort and trust in a suddenly shallow and capricious memory.

…And the place…?

“You passed out.”

“I… did?”

“They insisted upon testing you… I am sorry. It had to be done. I had to convince them I was not mistaken… but still, they are uncertain.”

The young man sank slowly down again to rest, feeling as though it had taken the mainstay of his strength simply to stand up, and now he was trembling again. The voice was soothing, though, and it’s lucid, almost musical cadence suppressed a desire to question. He didn’t understand; he didn’t understand any of this… but for the moment he would simply breathe, lie there and collect himself and his throbbing mind after the ordeal of the Light.

“Rest,” the Voice assured, “for as long as you need,” and gladly, he complied.


But it was not the end of the dream.

- If truly a dream it was.

For a long time he lay, curled upon the cold floor and gathering his wits. Nothing stirred in his mind for a long time, and he accepted the darkness and the Voice’s advice for as long as he could. How much time had passed between having found himself in the Dead Place and this void he couldn’t tell – minutes, hours… days it might’ve been. And all in a dream? At first it seemed dream-like, but now just lying there, waiting… he felt there was something he must do. If this was a dream, he was now wide-awake in it, and expectant.

I’ve never had a dream like this before.

Am I supposed to do something…?

He expected the Voice would still be present, somewhere; patiently waiting to be called upon once his body had recovered…which it finally had.

“What now?” he ventured, with no doubt it would answer; he could feel its presence somewhere, floating nearby and benign.

“That is up to you, little one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, but you will…” the Voice answered confidently, as the scene began to change and the darkness was drawn away as easily as a velvet curtain obscuring the plainest day.

* * * *

The blond closed his eyes a moment in the shower, letting the heat and drone of water pelting his bare shoulders quieten the silent fretting he’d been doing for the past two hours, hoping it’d wash away along with the memory of what’d suddenly gone from being a rather uninteresting to rather unpleasant day in a matter of seconds. Wait - fretting? No, that wasn’t it… why on earth should he worry if Puberty Boy had suddenly showed up out of nowhere, wanting to be friends again? Fretting wasn’t his style, after all.

Still, it was weird, he had to confess. He had been thinking, at the very least turning over and over something he hadn’t contemplated fully since the end of the whole thing with Ultimecia – and that was surprising - because it was all so hard to remember.

And, Hyne… so very screwed up.

Giving someone the time of day to ruin his mood was bad enough, but what was worse was… well, Puberty Boy wasn’t acting much like Puberty Boy any more. Even that constant from his life had vanished, which left only Balamb’s mediocrity and a very subdued Fujin and Raijin to remind him of who he even was these days.

It rattled him more than he was willing to admit.

Tilting his head back and letting the warmth spread across his throat and chest, he did begin to wonder again. In the matter of a couple of weeks, everything he’d ever known had been turned upside-down and inside-out… his home, priorities, loyalties… even his own attitude; the tracery of pale scars on his skin, still smarting under the brisk rap of the water, were proof of that - and the one on his forehead more so. That one still stung sometimes, for no apparent reason, no matter what curative touched it… and it didn’t seem like it wanted to fade any time soon. Which reminded him, of course - whenever he looked in a mirror – of him.

Of all the things to be able to remember with complete clarity, it had to him, didn’t it? Squall the loser, Squall the social incompetent... Squall the goddamn Champion of the World, apparently. If only he could remember the moment Hyne came down from wherever-the-fuck and granted Squall the ability to be anything other than World Champion Insensitive Prick - now that would’ve been something.

Sighing, the blond smoothed back his dripping hair and opened his eyes to the steam. A dull thud came from the other side of the door, along with a muffled voice complaining in a note several octaves higher than normal.

“Seifer, man, the hell are you doing in there? It’s been, like, forty-five minutes, ya know?”

The blond blinked. Forty-five minutes? Felt more like ten. Damn thinking - damn en-suite bathrooms, for that matter.

“It didn’t cross your mind to take a piss before I went in?” he called back dryly, but the already even higher-pitched and semi-coherent answer was drowned in the drumming of water on tiles as he stepped out of the cubicle, and reached for a towel. Probably spent long enough in there anyway, he noted, while pulling on a fresh tee and pants - the place was entirely steamed up and the mirror fogged. He’d barely opened the door a crack before Raijin flew past him and slammed it back shut with a contented sigh. Some things don’t change, he thought, half-amused, and Raijin’s soda habit was one of them.

Glancing around the empty room, he noticed Fujin had disappeared somewhere; the lights were low and the cicadas out… and he was succumbing to the ebb of a yawning fit. The work that morning’d been slow, and somehow that always made him feel more tired… and thinking - well, that just wore the brain out completely, especially when it was something that bothered him.

Like Squall and Chicken-Wuss, for instance, he thought, giving himself a mental eye-roll. What a waste of brain-power.

Despite rampant fatigue, however… Squall and the Chicken refused shut up and play dead in his head. And not only that, but they insisted on bringing Galbadians to the party as well. Even long after his two companions had returned and fallen asleep (Raijin sprawled out, snoring as loud as a runaway train) Seifer’s eyes continued to glint in the dark as he lay on the bed, kept open by a kind of cold, clambering dread that was slowly growing over and twisting around him like a creeper.

Garden’s gone… they’re not gonna alert anyone. Why would they?

Some Galbadians were here last week. So what? They didn’t find me. Probably don’t even know what I look like - their new broadcasting dish is being built here, anyway. ‘Minimal military involvement’. That’s where I overhead the price on my head, but -

Hey, you know what’s really stupid? All this fucking thinking about it, when there’s nothing I can do -

Annoyance, which had been slowly simmering for quite a while under some good breathing-control, finally bubbled over when Raijin’s snoring stopped… before it suddenly started up again even louder than before. Resisting the near-overwhelming urge to leap up and kick the oaf, hard, the blond instead found himself grabbing his coat off the hanger, boots from underneath it, and stomping down the dimly-lit stairwell for some much-needed silence.

I need a separate room. Or he does. Whatever.

Knowing the side door was almost always left open – Balamb was a quiet town after all – he made his way automatically toward it, thankful at least for the lack of racket even if it was a little cold for a September night…

…The last thing he expected was to walk smack into another body, crouched in the darkness, not four feet from the door.

*

TBC…

-------------------------------------------------------------

A/N:
Well, second instalment… and the story is already laying itself out nicely in my head like an obedient slave. First time that’s ever happened…

Do let me know if you liked, hated, were weirded-out by (or whatever!) by the story so far… feedback is always yummy. =D