[fic: final fantasy viii]

[trysts]

caede mea in nomine tuo
ffviii. rinoa heartily. rinoa x squall. sorceresses are good kindling. (I am not crazy) ~4550 | r
for stephie


i. liberi fatali

They don’t come until after Squall is gone, edging around the outside perimeter of her room like she’s liable to blast them into bits if they step too close (no, I won’t, I’m not like that, I’m not-) and she lets them take her, the pressure of their GFs like hooks in her skin, bearing down on her.

Quistis looks sad, almost, but steps out of the way.

It’s a testament to them, to Garden, to the SeeDs, Rinoa thinks, that they waited until Squall had gone to Esthar. He’s wrong if he thought she wasn’t aware, the downshift of the atmosphere, the sins and the fears coming to bear. The commander’s room and the commander’s bed is a shield, but a sorceress is a large target, easy to hit, and she caught the flimsy tendrils of whispers whenever he shifted his shoulder, whenever business and duty allowed his presence in her mind to ease.

For her there’s only a cautious acceptance (at first) and then raw, rubbed fear (later), sandpaper that scrapped against the exterior of her mind, until she felt like she was compressing herself so tightly her bones grinded into each other.

They came for her when he left, the only memento of him a strand of dark hair and the deep impression of his head on the pillow beside hers, and she went with them.

she went with them, Rinoa thinks, isn’t that important? That she went with them?

“He’ll come back, he didn’t leave,” Rinoa says (he didn’t leave me.)

It’s the largest room in Balamb Garden, but when it’s the only room, every day, it feels small, like the walls keep inching closer. She walks routs into the ground, swears she can almost see her footprints sunken into the thick carpet.

Quistis sits on the bed. She’s the only who one visits, and there’s a sort of weariness to her. And Rinoa wants to laugh (it’s me. It’s me. Don’t you know me?) but she’s not crazy and she knows that if she laughs then she’ll never be able to stop and she’s not crazy.

“I’m not crazy,” she says, and knows a year ago, two, she would have known better than to say it. Only the insane deny their insanity. “I’m not.”

“I know, Rinoa.” Quistis, all cool water flowing words. Has Shiva been wedged into her skull so deeply that it’s not blood in her veins, but ice? If she cut her open would she find glaciers instead of organs?

Rinoa jerks away. Magic-raw, unbridled, fires banked-thrums at her temples. No. No. I’m not crazy. Not crazy. Not. Notnotnotnotnotnotnot.

“He’ll come back,” Rinoa says and she knows she sounds defeated.

Quistis sighs. “I know Rinoa.”

But the question hangs between them, like a guillotine, and what then, when he comes back?

Squall does come back, scaling the walls with a grappling and a bangle clenched between his teeth. Balamb had docked at the edge of Centra for engine repairs-Rinoa knows, though no one told her, because she’d smelled the gas and electricity on the wind, propane and diesel.

He blows the window off its hinge, and she’s already scrambling out of bed, scrambling to fall into his arms and claw at his chest-you left me you left me I think I’m going crazy, can you feel it, Squall? It feels like there’s something eating away at me, worms on a corpse but I’m not a corpse I’m not crazy.

She kisses him, fiercely. “You left,” she says, almost angry.

“I’m sorry,” Squall replies and she knows he is. He wouldn’t say it if he wasn’t. That’s Squall. Steady, firm, not exactly gentle but exactly what she needed.

“Where did you go?” she asks, twisting away from him. Her fingers move restlessly through her hair. “Things have gotten bad, Squall. And not just the SeeDs and the Gardens, but me. Me, Squall. I. The magic-it’s getting harder to-sometimes I-”

This time he kisses her, tongue and teeth and his fingers on her shoulders, tight and tighter. She can feel him through their bond-Knight to Sorceress, and sometimes she hates that husband should be weaker than knight, but not right now because having him in her head, feeling him and how he knows, makes it easier.

I’m not going crazy. He’s my Knight, and there are good Sorceresses. I am a good Sorceress.

“Here,” he says, pulling away. “Hurry, we don’t have much time.”

The bangle glows a brilliant silver in the watery, dappled moonlight. Odine’s bangle. She recognizes it. Sometimes she had nightmares about it, sees her face twisting into a grotesque mask, thick black jagged marks curving along her cheeks.

They’d tried it once, right after she married. Quistis’s idea. It wasn’t so bad, back then. Back when everyone had been cautious, but still mostly friendly (the few that weren’t, that watched her flinty, angry eyes had been easy to shake off, to file under wrong). She’d put it on because she hadn’t wanted this. If it gave everyone a measure of peace, to know the beast was caged, why not wear the bracelet?

Except when it had snapped into place it was like her body had forgotten how to breathe. Her lungs had compressed, her world had exploded in a shower of overly bright, stark sparks. She’d heard Selphie crying, screaming, Squall’s angry voice, and Quistis’s cold hand yanking off the bangle.

(later, Odine categorized it as a miscalculation. This wasn’t blue magic, easily suppressed under a silence, this was Source Magic. All magic. The root, the foundation, the ocean in which all tributaries flowed into. Too much a part of ze Sorceress, her body is ze magic. She is the magic, and the magic is her, like her lungs, like her heart, and the bangle had stapled her together, contorted her body until it forgot itself. All Rinoa had thought-I was going to do that to Ultimecia.)

“But,” she starts. Putting it on had been agonizing, taking it off had been worse, like in the Ragnarok when there had suddenly been gravity, bearing down on her.

“Trust me,” Squall says. “Rinoa.”

She does. Of course she does. It closes around her wrist with a soft click.

They run. The bangle wears her down like a dead weight knotted at her wrist. Squall drags her when her body, depleted from the drain on her magic, threatens to cave. He won’t let her quit. Squall does not know how and he cannot see that she does either.

But they do stop, at the place they always stop. Edea’s orphanage. But the not the slanted, decayed building, a good wind burst away from bowing completely over. They always go right to the flowers, the blues and the purples superimposed over the greens, the smell of clean, pure air and moss and earth. It reminds them that once (once) this had been a fairy tale.

There Rinoa feels safe enough to drop to her knees. There Squall feels safe enough to let her.

“Why?”

“Politics, power changes, the hands wielding it change. Sorceresses are good scapegoats.”

No, Rinoa thinks, Sorceresses are good kindling. She wants to laugh, but it lodges up in her throat, nearly asphyxiating.

“No, I mean why.” She can’t force herself to ask, but he must feel it, through the bond. Her questions-why did he leave, why did he come back, why did they flee, he gave up everything for her, position, ranking, power, for her and she knows that he loves her, she can feel it a tight little hot ball below her heart, but still. Why?

He crouches beside her, and his hand moves through her hair, the frizzled strands at her temples. Shouldn’t there be silver in her hair by now? Hints of it in his? Her magic’s sunken into his veins too, embalmed him the way she’s been, and could she feel guilty about it, at the smooth lines of his face when he stands next to Irvine and the aches in his joints, Quistis and the crinkles at her mouth and eyes, the way Selphie can no longer keep up with him on a run?

The short answer is yes.

But the real answer is no never.

“You can feel it can’t you? My magic, it’s-it’s more than anything, it’s bigger than anything, it’s everything and I can feel it, whittling down my bones-you have to feel it too. I-I-what if I-”

His mouth swallows her words, and the earth cradles her back and she cradles his hips, and she wants to cry because she’s yearned for the safety, the familiarity, of his body. She doesn’t love him as fiercely as she had in her youth, caught up in the whirlwind of it, of the careful way his eyes had hungrily traced her like he didn’t dare allow himself to, but it had transformed, transmuted, became something that stretched years and continents and planes of existence, that made just seeing him enough to sooth her, that made touching him like tasting the waters of heaven.

But she pulls way. “Squall. Please. I’m serious.” How odd. He’s always been the one with seriousness pinned to his chest, she’s always been the one to remind him to laugh. “I think I’m-I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

A gloved finger touches the wet seem of her mouth, the edge of his thumb pulling her bottom lip away from her teeth.

“I never told you,” he says. “I should have, but do you remember, that day in this field?”

She knows what he was talking about. It’s the most vivid memory she has. The Sorceress Memorial’s shadow stretching long behind them, the bright, hot colors of the springtime flowers, her adrenaline sapping out her to leave only a terror of herself and what she was, and Squall. Squall.

“I thought to myself-I thought-if the whole world turned against you, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t. Not to me. I’d be your Knight.”

No. No. No, some part of her thinks but Rinoa can’t find the strength to form up the words, his are too precious and too comforting. It’s wrong to find balm in knowing he loves her more than the world, but she needs it, she needs it right now because she’s not sure if she loves herself more than the world.

ii. dormierit cum leones

It’s not long before they’re found out and Rinoa knows the bite of betrayal-Quistis or Zell or Irvine or Selphie-one of them because no one else would have known. Edea’s dead now, and Cid with her, their secret buried in the dirt piled on top of them.

“Commander Leonheart, you’re under arrest for abandoning your duties to Garden,” the SeeD says. “Please step away from the Sorceress.”

Rinoa! she nearly screams, but she’s not crazy so she doesn’t. The words are like ice shards driven into her chest. Step away from the Sorceress, leave her to hang alone.

She takes one step forward, and the SeeDs step back, frightened young children, and they remind her of Squall. He would have killed her too, back then.

But now he’s shoving her behind him, two fingers to her forehead and suddenly there’s pressure at the base of her neck, blunted little claws digging into her scalp. She’s never liked them, the Guardian Forces. She’d even convinced Squall to stop, but this brief brush shows her that he’s relapsed, with a vengeance-Diablos, Doomtrion, Alexander, Bahamut-and then she has Carbuncle shoving into her brain, junctioned magic slicking into her veins like a morphine drip, and there’s more, Cerberus and Siren, hooking into her brain, pushing and shoving to make room. She doesn’t like the GFs, hates the sensation that they’re pulling at her brain matter, tossing things aside to make room for themselves. The first, and only thing, memory she’d ever let them take from her was the memory of her the lilt of her mother’s voice.

It had been enough.

Mother’s face and mother’s eyes and the few good years she had had with her father, Selphie’s warmth and Quistis’s support and Irvine’s teasing and Zell’s strength. She offers them all up to altar of her guardian forces’ power, and takes the magic they bestow in equal exchange, weaving it into the wild, fierce flow of her Source magic.

Whatever it takes, she thinks.

But, you see, the battle is already lost and later, later, she sees in Squall’s mind-he already knew that.

The last SeeD implodes, and then shatters outward, gristle and guts and blood splattering across the flowers, across the field, but she doesn’t care about that-about anything. She crouches besides Squall, her hands moving across his side, to the blood pooling just below his chest.

“Curaga,” she says, shuffling through her draw. Her rage is a wild storm, barely held in check by the silvery bangle burning hot at her wrist. “Curaga.” She feels a shiver at the back of her mind as Carbuncle shies away from her ruthless yanks.

His fingers tap against her wrist, and then slid to the bangle. “Rinoa,” he groans.

“Shut up.” It hadn’t meant to come out so biting. But she feels mean-wild, hateful, blistering, the sun in the desert, Source incarnate. “I mean. Please. Squall. Please. Hold on. Curaga.”

The blood keeps coming.

“I’ll be waiting,” he says.

“No.”

“If you come here,” he repeats, and there is a soft little click and the bangle disappears, swallowed up in bloody flowers. Her fingers clench at his shoulders so tightly she worries she’ll snap him in two. “I love you. More than-”

It’s like a torrent, like a maelstrom, battering into her. Rinoa has been a rubber band stretched taunt for so many years.

Squall snaps her.

She dives into him, but that’s too graceful, too artful a term. That suggests beauty. No, instead, she throws herself into him, bats away his mind’s feeble resistance at such a complete invasion. She digs into him, she forges her way, and finds him.

He’s alive, but his soul, his essence, the core of him, feels more wormy than anything else, wriggling around on dying legs. Is that wrong? That he feels almost like an insect, burning in a baking heat?

But that’s how she takes him. Like an insect. Like a firefly caught and held in a jar. She pulls it out of his body, and into hers, and wedges him there, throws all the guardian forces aside to make room for him. You don’t matter. You don’t matter. You couldn’t save him.

His body is just a hollow husk, like a mussel shell. She drags it against her. The body doesn’t matter because she can still feel Squall, shivering against her mind, trying to escape her to spread out into the air but unable. She won’t let him. But he needs a body to go back to, so she drags it with her.

Selphie (traitor traitor traitortraitortraitor pray I never see you pray) told her once how Squall had carried her piggy-back all the way to Esthar. Squall had gone bright, hot pink in his face and had looked like he was considering dumping Selphie into the nearest body of water (I will drown you in your own blood) and she’d teased him relentlessly for weeks.

Rinoa’s always been more of a romantic soul than Squall. She carries him draped across her chest the whole way.

They’re looking for her still, apparently, and Ellone meets her at the edge of Esthar, the glass, iridescent city sheeting over its rotted, gutted center; the sort of painting you’d hang on a wall to cover up a hole.

“Did you tell Laguna?” There’s no question in Rinoa’s mind that Ellone had already known, but still she lays the body at her feet like a pagan offering.

“No, he-no, he couldn’t know, not now. Later. I’ll tell him.” If Ellone’s lying, it’s too herself. “Rinoa, what-what have you-”

“I’m not crazy,” she says. Magic burns, broils, through her veins, unleashed and hungry, links unchained by Squall’s shaking hands, and she worries that she’ll be nothing but ash soon, tangled in Squall’s hair.

“But Squall-”

“He’s not dead.”

“I know he’s not,” Ellone cries. “I can feel him! How. Rinoa-you junctioned him to yourself, like he was a-how? I sort of do that, sending people through time, but only me, or a Guardian Force. But you did it, to Squall?”

“I didn’t know, I just wanted-I wanted to keep him with me. He was dy-leaving-it was the only thing I could think of.” Rinoa remembers now, shoving out all her GFs, yanking them out of her brain like stitches and stuffing Squall inside the empty spaces. Source magic, more than any magic, foundation magic, the thing in everything-it was keeping him anchored to her.

“Why? Look at his body, Rinoa. The body’s already gone.”

“Send me forward,” she orders. “As far as you can. As fast you can. We can’t save him, here, but maybe there they can. There has to be something.”

Ellone looks hesitant, unsure, like the world is breathing on her neck.

“Please,” Rinoa whimpers. She does not care.

Finally, Ellone’s resistance softens, and then molds around Rinoa. Bends to her will. Rinoa releases a breath and unclenches her hand, unaware that she had been summoning spells in preparation of a no. She would have forced-

“Take a deep breath, we have to do this quickly. They’re looking for you.”

“They’ll found us, won’t they? Our bodies at least?”

“No I. I might be able to, I’ve never been sure but-you’re power, it’s not even like Ultimecia’s. Or maybe it is except, except, I have your body, I have every part of you right here, and it’s just more. Or maybe I’m more, now that I’m older. I don’t know. But it’s easier. I might be able to move you solid. We’ll see. If not, if not-”

“I don’t care.”

Ellone nods, sharply and once, and lifts her open palms, fingers stretching so far Rinoa can hear the joints pop and creak with protest.

Clutching Squall, Rinoa’s body splinters, one part going forward, the other going back, and then she’s drowning and Squall is roaring in her ear (in her head, because that’s where she’s keeping him) and she’s falling forward, into the cavernous vacuum of time.

Laguna and Kiros find Ellone in a wet, dark puddle of her own blood. Alone.

She wakes up with the sensation that parts of herself are missing. She-her name eludes her, slippery little eel between her fingers, and the lights of the city burn behind her retina. She swallows, and tastes the bite of fire, of ice, of water, of magic. Her magic. She’s powerful, she’s strong. She knows that, irrevocably. She is Source. Is she unbridled. She is a universe in a compact body.

She rolls, and collides with the body, yelping and skidding back. Something inside her, something uncomfortable biting into her cortex like a barnacle on the hull of ship, quivers, wedges tighter against her. It hurts, burns, but an animal instinct won’t let her thrust it away, instead opens itself to it, whispering mine and receiving a mine in return. She looks at the body and struggles to remember whowhowhowhowhowhowhowho.

Her hand sweeps a discerningly familiar hand through his hair, tracing the angry scar across his face. It feels like she should now the history of that mark, but her mind is tabula rosa-blank.

(if you come here, something inside her says, and a tremor crawls like spiders up her skin, if you come here I’ll be¬-but where? Memories dip and dive out of her reach, untouchable, untraceable, she is left adrift with no connection to solid ground except-I’ll be waiting, if you come.)

Something catches her eye, a silvery something on a heavy cord hung around his neck. Her fingers close around the lion’s head, feeling the bite of metal in her palm. Griever, her mind says.

“Griever,” she says to the body and knows, then, that she is here for him. Griever. Everything is about him. Her existence is carved down to him, to the shape of him, but the body is not breathing. Why.

No, the wind whispers in her ear (mind-no I’m not crazy) and she pulls him close. She knows to find a hospital.

“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do,” the doctor says, voice drunk on her magic. She’d had to transfer some into him when he’d proved reluctant to aid a skinny, little woman with blood on her clothes and a dead body in her arms.

“No,” the mangled concoction of her grief and rage sends the doctor through a window. Ignoring the screams down below, and the putrid smell of terror, she crosses to the pristine bed and the bloody man on it.

“Griever,” she says, cupping his face. She kisses him, and it feels familiar, an ancient rite between them. And her heart twists that she cannot remember-why can’t she remember “Come back to him.”

She pours her magic into him, wine into an empty goblet. Unwittingly the thin, shivery thing in her mind goes with it, goes into him. She sends a jolt of electricity through his veins, willing him-comebacktomeyouareminecomebacktomeIamyours.

He jerks upright, scream garbled in his throat, eyes black around the rims, face contorted into a mask of agony. But she clutches him, holds him fiercely and tightly and with what she thinks must be love (she loves him, she knows it straight into her bones, her marrow, she loves him but she cannot remember) and wills him into himself.

His hand moves across her stomach, her breasts, his lips on hers. He looks at her like she’s a feast, and he is a starved man. He would gorge himself on her and she would let him-does let him.

She wakes up naked and still covered in blood beneath him, wedged into the small hospital bed. A nurse and orderly had come looking for the doctor. She’d blown them to itty bitty pieces for daring.

A cry of pain startles her. He clutches his chest, his heart stuttering. She can feel it, the motions of his organs in hers, and knows-his body does not remember how to be. She might have wept, except she knows what to do. Suddenly, she knows how to save him.

She binds his body to hers, the half-working organs to hers, his fractured soul to hers, his faltering heart to her pulsing one, makes him more than himself, makes him magic, her magic, bound to her and bound to the silver lion around his neck and lodges every little bit of him into her mind, lets him feast his fill on her.

His mouth moves in a predatory snarl as the last of him plunges into the necklace, compartmentalized and saved and alive. She kisses him, one last time, and feels the tears, congealing at the corners of her eyes, but unable to fall. He’s eaten even her body’s memory of grief.

The snarl haunts her. It had sounded like “Rin”.

iii. dues ex machine

She takes the city not like a conqueror, but like a god come to her people. They bow before her, before her mind, preen over the magic she drapes over them like a funeral shroud. When a man annoys her and she pulls out his windpipe and they cheer at the carnage, wanton and lustful.

The silver lion hangs like a cross around her neck.

I’ll be waiting for you, if you come here.

She turns, but there’s no one at her side, whispering it into her ears. Something inside her stirs. I’ll be waiting, if you come here.

“Why?” she says.

But she knows. She has to go back. She does not need the past or the present or the future. All of them are disappointments, seep poison into her veins and drain her of her happiness. But in a single moment, there would not be enough time for it to bleed in, and she could relive it over and over again.

She could go back. She could go there. (There-a vague, abstract concept but somehow seems more solid, more real than anything she can hold in hand. There. There is flowers, there is the sweet perfume of them, and there is a smile, warm hands holding her.)

I’ll be waiting.

A vague memory tickles her, like a fly, and her Griever buckles and strains against his confines, yearning. She soothes him with her mind, stroking him, promising him. Soon. Let’s go back. I just want that moment. I want time to stop.

“Junction Machine Ellone,” the scientist explains.

She feels the rousing of Griever in her mind at the name. Odd, for it have invoked a reaction. She plants a kiss on his nose, and shoves him back down into the blackness of her power, and he sleeps again.

“Invented by the legendary Dr. Odine himself.”

Acid settles on her tongue, metallic. She nods for the scientist to continue.

“It could send my lady back, to the past, and as you said with-with more Source Magic-create such a spell that would compress all time to a single moment.”

“A single good moment.”

“Yes. Yes.” He nods, thinking. “You would be in the center of such a spell, it would be yours, and the world with it, to shape as you like. That is-that is your wish?”

“Yes. That is my wish. My only wish.” Her hands close around the lion pendant, cushioned between her breasts, until the metal punctures her skin, and blood rolls scarlet down the silvery head. She feels Griever, restless again. “Send me back.”

“I can… only your spirit can be sent back currently, my lady. But you are a Sorceress. Perhaps if you found some young Sorceress in that time, you could use her body.” He swallows, nervous. The last the doctor had had his head severed from his shoulders and the Sorceress is beautiful and awe-inspiring and terrifying. “It may be that the machine cannot sent you back far enough, initially, but I-we-have pinpointed the location of Dr. Odine’s original Ellone. We can-we can send you to her, and you could use her to go even farther.”

“Do it. Do it. What you can, send back. I want to go back, back. I want to go there.” The scientist doesn’t understand. How could he? Not even Griever, so constant, so steadfast, so loyal, can understand. She thinks now her Griever might have been a knight (her knight), but he’s a patchwork doll and all the Sorceress’s magic and all the Sorceress’s scientists couldn’t put the lion back together again.

But, in a single moment, they could be whole and if she can make them whole for a single moment, she will damn the world for it.

(If you come here, she remembers, Iamnotcrazy). She laughs.

you’ll find me. I promise.