Chapters: 7/?
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Rinoa Heartilly/Squall Leonhart, Seifer Almasy/Ellone, Laguna Loire/Xu
Characters: Seifer Almasy, Squall Leonhart, Rinoa Heartilly, Ellone (Final Fantasy VIII), Xu (Final Fantasy VIII), Laguna Loire
Summary:
Of all places for Seifer to end up, it had to be a festering trash heap like this motel, in one of the rankest parts of Timber. He’s been missing for months, and there’s been no word of him since he abandoned Raijin and Fujin in FH six months ago.
Until now.
(Everyone knows what happens to the sorceresses; no one knows what happens to the knights.)
fic: and perhaps be welcomed home again (ffviii alt-canon)
They begin together, in a Centran field hospital, and lose each other the next day. They begin again seventeen years later, teetering on the edge of hell. Almasy twins alternate-canon; cowritten with @professional-fangirl2187.
Whiskey melts down the rocks, icebergs drowning in three inches of amber. Somewhere in another room, the clock ticks away minute after minute after minute.
Edea picks up the glass between her palms, rolling it to clink the remnants of ice against the sides, but it doesn’t serve to be the distraction she expects, and she sets it back down again, precisely on top of the condensation ring already on the wooden tabletop.
This is not the conversation she wants to have, but here they are, with all this silence to fill. Her golden boy, her sweet cherubim baby. He is neither of those things, and he will always be them both, deep down inside beneath the layers he’s built against the universe.
The world is too cruel for dreamers like him.
“I wanted you, you know,” she says finally. “More than anything. More than life. When you were laid in my arms for the first time, I felt whole.”
The hospital bright and clinical clean, the smell of death still lingering around the edges-- his parents had been killed in a minor skirmish on the Esthari border (as if any sort of battle that ends in corpses and ashes could be called minor), his birth mother a sorceress with no control over her gifts, the phone call unexpected but not unanswered. Cid had stayed at home with their current fosters; they had been down this path a dozen times already.
Edea Kramer’s home for wayward youth, and infants with bright blonde hair, sea-glass eyes too innocent for this world. He had been so small, and now look at him, hulking, filling up so much of the space without even trying. They had put him in her arms, and he had looked up at her with so much trust, and she had signed the adoption papers without even thinking twice about it. Her son, her sweet, precious little boy.
She remembers whispering, nothing else bad will ever happen to you. How wrong she’d been.
The world isn’t made for men like him, forged from fire, magic, fury.
Her son says nothing, just stares into his own glass, silent, heavier around the edges, like something is sitting on his shoulders, bearing down hard. She wonders how much of that is herself, in a black dress and a plumed collar, midnight claws digging into his throat.
Edea shakes her head, and half-expects to hear the jangling of gilded jewels. There is only the whisper of her hair in its place, still long, dark as pitch. This conversation is overdue. Saying what she does is the hardest thing she’s had to undertake since coming back from the war, and it’s astonishing Seifer has agreed to see her at all.
“I should have just stayed in Centra. Ignored the prophecy. Ignored everything-- kept you safe.”
“But you didn’t.”
His voice sounds hollow, and beneath that, betrayed. She deserves every ounce of that betrayal, that hurt and anger that he carries simmering beneath his skin-- she’s damned him, just by being his mother.
“I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Her whiskey comes up, smoked honey that burns clean all the way down, some fancy, expensive bottle Cid keeps trying to save for a special occasion. Life is too short to bury a bottle in the back of the liquor cabinet; don’t they all know that from personal experience at this point? She takes another sip.
“Did you know? That she was going to come for me?”
Did she? Edea shrugs, because it’s the most honest she can be. “I didn’t know what she was going to do-- all I could think about was keeping her from any of you, and I think she pulled your name out of my mind, the most precious thing I had.”
But can she even say that, spending most of his youth on a ship out to sea, protecting some other child rather than her own son?
It was for their own good.
She has made many hard choices in her life, but loving her children? Has always been the easiest thing in the world. Edea reaches across the table, covering his broad hand with one of her own, her fingers small and slim against his too-warm skin.
She had tried to keep him from the succession, and in doing so, she has thrown him right in the midst of it.
He flinches at the touch, but doesn’t withdraw his hand. The stillness, somehow, is worse. Would it be easier if he hated her? Probably. But instead he is wounded, betrayed, but he is still her boy, and that is going to make this harder on them both, trying to push past the inevitable, callous hand that fate has dealt.
Edea finds her own resolve, looking him square in the eyes, even if his gaze doesn’t quite meet hers. It will take time-- it will take time. Everything does.
“I will never let anything like that happen to you ever again, Seifer. I promise.”
It is not a promise she has any right to make, not again, but he needs to know. She would rather die than watch him suffer and hurt and rage because he is too young to understand that the world is a thing with sharp teeth and nails, that it will swallow you up before you can even blink if you let down your guard for one split-second.
He’s so young, and yet he isn’t a boy anymore; she can see it in his gaze. He doesn’t believe her. Wants to, wants to so badly it must eat him up inside, but doesn’t.
She doesn’t know if that’s better, or worse, than she was expecting.
“What do we do now, then?” Seifer asks, as he slips his hand from beneath hers, raising his glass to his lips instead.
Edea has no answer, none that he will like, anyway.
“We try to pick up the pieces, I guess.”
He picks up the bottle instead, and pours them both a second glass.
summary: he doesn’t understand how they got here. for @shockwavepulsar.
Quistis Trepe has a pretty mouth.
He doesn’t know why he’s so fixated on that, but it’s better than being fixated on anything else, especially the words coming out of said mouth, spoken at him, rather than to him. Seifer is too far gone to catch more than one out of every thirty, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll shut up when she shuts up, and no one is capable of stopping her before then.
The shock blanket from the ambulance is very scratchy around his shoulders. Seifer’s gaze slips from her lips to the brown fabric, and he thinks maybe he should peel it off, hurl it aside, but his arms don’t respond to his commands, nor do his legs. The whole reason he’s still sitting here, on the curb outside of what remains of his little apartment building near the sketchier end of town, is because standing up seems like it’s completely impossible.
Right now, the building is a dying inferno. He’s lucky the other two occupants weren’t home (and he’s sure that’s the middle of Trepe’s rant, that he could have killed someone else.) There’s nothing they can do but watch it burn, Balamb’s tiny fire department keeping the blaze controlled until it smothers itself out beneath the sea-salt-scented night sky.
Trepe’s mouth stops moving, when his eyes slip back onto her face, and he hates the expression he sees there, hates the way sympathy downturns her lips and saddens her bright blue eyes. She’s not even really dressed for the weather, in gym shorts and a t-shirt with a band logo he’s never heard of written across the chest, her hair loose and blowing in the wind.
He should feel grateful that someone’s come down from Garden at all to make sure he’s alright, but right now, he doesn’t feel anything at all, just the lingering heat in his palms, the itchy blanket, the breeze across heat-struck cheeks.
The fire could have consumed him, and yet, it hadn’t, an untouched circle on his bed even as the rest of the apartment had raged-- instinct had driven him out the second-story window, into the scrubby grass below.
“It was an accident,” he says finally, and it’s the first thing he’s said since he woke up, a scream still on his lips and the fire raging. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
Her face softens, and when she wraps her arms around him, Seifer doesn’t know how to react, because this isn’t their usual MO. They’re not soft, they’re not gentle. His face turns, nose pressing against the curve of her neck, breathing in her scent instead of the smoke, her hand on the back of his head, fingers carding through his hair-- Seifer sucks in a sharp, shuddering breath, and feels the weight return to his body, feels the ground beneath bare feet.
“I know,” Quistis says. “I was just afraid.”
She takes him back to Garden with her, settled in the front seat of her practical, silver SUV, her Garden parking tag hanging from the rearview mirror. He rolls down the window, because the air conditioning is too stifling for him to breathe.
It is a very quiet drive. She’s spent so many nights at his apartment lately that Seifer’s almost forgotten how silent and serene the halls of Garden are after midnight; they take the shortcuts, and end up at her dorm sooner than he he realizes, when she enters her keycode. Faint beeps echo, drawing his attention down to the motion of her hand, the door sliding open to admit them access.
Her dorm is neat, organized; it is a sharp contrast to Seifer’s place-- was, anyway. He’s got nothing, now, he guesses, except the gym shorts he’d gone to sleep in, and the shock blanket still wrapped around him.
Awesome.
“Do you want to take a shower? Eat something? I have some instant noodles, and there’s some leftovers in the fridge...”
He shakes his head to the food, and moves in the direction of the shower, aware she probably wouldn’t want him covered in soot and dirt and grass stains in her white-sheeted bed. Seifer leaves the blanket in her laundry hamper, and the shorts on the floor, and turns the knob to somewhere cold.
She’s still awake when he walks out of the bathroom a while later, wearing a pair of sweats he’d left the last time he had stayed here, sitting in her bed with her laptop on her knees and her fingers moving over the keyboard. There’s a cup of tea on the nightstand, steaming warm and fragrant; he picks it up and drinks it without asking permission. It soothes something in him. Tastes nice, at least. Like she’s put honey in it.
Her glasses are sliding down her nose when Quistis looks up at him. He slouches on the mattress next to her, occupying what remains of the space-- Garden isn’t built for men like him, men who take up more space than they should be allowed, but right now, he needs the closeness, the comfort, the unusual things that he would have never asked for of Quistis Trepe not all that long ago.
She shuts her laptop, offering it to him to set on the end table; Seifer complies, and tries to give her back her cup of tea.
“I made it for you,” she says. “It’s got valerian in it; it’ll help you sleep.”
“Oh.” He looks into the cup, like she’s poisoned him, but keeps drinking it anyway, because the warmth it provides is something different, something not as intense as magic, as the fire.
God, he’s so tired of burning.
“I’ll be out of your hair in the morning,” he says. “I’ll crash with Fuu or Rai for a while, I guess.”
“You can stay here as long as you want. I’ll order in a bigger bed.” It’s something like a joke, in the surreality of their situation, but it makes him smile a little, at least, and her reactionary smile is a much nicer look on her lips than fear and scolding and worry. She takes his hand, fingers threading through his, whip-callused skin still like velvet against his palm.
Seifer lifts their twined hands, and kisses the back of hers.
“But you’re still gonna stay up all night and make sure I don’t burn down your place, too, right?”
She shrugs, head coming to rest against his shoulder-- there’s a distant thrum of pain there, and he thinks maybe he fucked something up on his landing during his mad flight. That’s a problem for tomorrow, for Kadowaki. Right now, wild horses couldn’t drag him out of this bed, from beneath her cheek.
“Maybe.”
And maybe it’s valerian in that tea, maybe she’s doped him, but the exhaustion that’s been kept at bay by the fire, the subsequent shock, the drive back to Garden, slams into him with the force of a train; he sets the mug down near her computer. She draws the comforter up over them.
He’s asleep before she gets the blanket all the way up, the maybe quips never making it across his lips; this time, the dreams don’t come, there’s no defensive fire that bursts from his hands in an effort to keep a witch at bay.
fic: have you any dreams you’d like to sell (ffviii, 3-4/??)
Rinoa has put more than thirty years between herself and Garden, but those who try to forget the past are often doomed to repeat it. At least this time, she won’t walk this path alone.
