fic: imperfect tense (ff8) - ch.12
Sep. 28th, 2011 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jukeboxhound_backupI'm developing such a hate-boner for LJ's posting and editing functions. Just thought I'd share.
Imperfect Tense
Chapter 12
FF7/8 || R - sexuality, battle violence, language || Squall/Seifer, Sephiroth/Cloud || crossover
Jenova's legacy, living on through the Sorceresses, is forcing Squall to deal with an unstable Seifer, Cloud Strife, and yet another potential end of the world. Maybe paperwork really wasn't so bad.
Word Count: 2,900
12.
“CHAOS?” Quistis repeated, because not everyone had voices in their heads to explain things that didn’t make sense, but Cloud was already a blur of motion, barking, “Zell, take her down to the outermost flank of the monsters opposite the big flying thing. Be ready – we don’t know if these monsters are immune to materia or physical attacks or something.”
“Materia?” said Squall.
Cloud paused. “Materia. Magic,” he said slowly, his tone clearly wondering if the high-altitude pressure had gotten to him.
“I’ve got Ifrit,” Zell volunteered. Ragnarok bucked harshly, making hands shoot out to grab onto the nearest stable surface, and he colorfully cursed all airborne monsters. Cloud staggered back upright, looking like he’d dropped his stomach in the cargo bay, and started rummaging around in the many pockets of his trousers.
“I have Quezacotl and Siren,” Quistis added briskly. “I made sure to pick them up before we left, since Squall already has Shiva.”
After a moment of silent staring, Cloud shook his head in puzzlement and made an ‘a-ha!’ face, pulling several small orbs out of a random pocket. They looked like large marbles and glowed in a way that reminded Squall uncomfortably of the shine to Cloud’s eyes. Cloud drew his oversized sword and slipped the marbles into small spherical slots just above the hilt, giving the blade the shine of elemental magic.
Shiva shifted in the back of Squall’s mind, whispering, We fight, my lion.
When Ragnarok reached a low enough altitude, Cloud opened the hatch and yelled over the sudden rush of air, “Let’s mosey.”
Then he jumped, blade already swinging. Squall resisted the urge to smack a palm against his own forehead.
…
Wind screamed through Cloud’s ears and stole the breath from his lungs. He instinctively twisted as he fell, Ultima already filthy with the strange colors of monster guts and Zack whooping with excitement. Even Sephiroth wasn’t immune and he curved Cloud’s lips into a grim smile.
The ground rushed towards him like a speeding train and he whirled Ultima above his head, bringing it down and shattering pavement into three long fault-lines that took out a herd of grat-malboro-somethings. They exploded in a way that gleefully reminded Zack of cherry bombs in ShinRa’s water pipes and Sephiroth snapped that they were somewhat busy, please stay on topic, Lieutenant.
CHAOS’ familiar bellow shook Cloud’s bones as he settled into the heavy flow of mako coursing through his veins, making him vaguely wonder why he couldn’t hear the solid thumps of Tifa’s fists or the jangle of Nanaki’s combs. Under the instinctive action-reaction of battle he could feel a pull deep in his ribcage, wrapping around his heart and calling reunionreunionreunion, and if there had been any doubt that Jenova – Rinoa, a Sorceress, that’s what Squall called her – was here, there was no need to guess anymore.
A freezing wind swept over the street feeling suspiciously like Shiva’s Diamond Dust. Cloud risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the ice goddess happily slaughtering the monsters with icy needles and icicles that shot out of the ground into soft underbellies. Anyone that was well-versed in stoicism would have seen the borderline-psychotic satisfaction Squall was taking in violence, and Zack took the opportunity to point out that this was what happened you became a desk jockey and didn’t get laid often enough.
…
Seifer was feeling a little disturbed. Not because he was witnessing a fair amount of mayhem and destruction, although it was going to be a fucking bitch getting the blood out of his coat, but because he was hearing shit again.
Come, my Knight, let us rule this world as –
At least she’d learned not to pronounce her ‘C’s so hard that they became ‘K’s, or maybe it wasn’t Ultimecia at all but something worse. As what, master and lapdog?
I loved you when no one else did (except that wasn’t entirely true, but don’t think of grey-blue eyes or lost opportunities), I gave you strength –
You gave me betrayal and lost honor, wasn’t even able to go a day without breaking down, fuck you, fuck you, just go away.
The fountain in the center of Dollet’s square was split down the middle, broken pipes flooding the cobblestones and making it difficult to keep one’s footing. Seifer swore as he slipped, but took the opportunity to slide under the guard of a monster, slit its throat, and use his momentum to keep sliding and avoid the rush of blood like a fucking ninja. Unfortunately, this ninja was distracted by the sudden sound of Ragnarok soaring overheard and narrowly missed a claw to the groin.
“Well, fuck me, it worked,” he muttered, wondering if he should be relieved for the backup or pissed that the monsters hadn’t taken out the communication tower before Balamb Garden had gotten the message. Fuck his life, you mess up once and let yourself try to take over the world, no one ever lets you forget it.
(“This doesn’t make us BFFs, Puberty Boy.”)
The sound of Ragnarok was undercut by the roar of a monster Seifer had never seen before, nearly the size of a fucking T-rexaur with wings and a chip on his shoulder, if the way it ploughed into the monsters was any indication. Hyne’s fucking balls. At least it was killing its own kind, for now.
Seifer was exhausted, but it wasn’t all because of the fighting.
…
her monsterchildren were dying and it felt like tiny pinpricks of pain on the surface of her human flesh
my son
it hurts i will kill those that stand before me squall
oh hyne squall please
come to me my son
sephir-
mother needs you
…
The first thing Irvine thought when he woke up was that he’d been on one hell of a weekend bender: roiling stomach, pounding head, muscles that felt like they’d put through a grinder, but at least he still had his clothes.
Then his brain caught up with his memory and he wished he really had woken up naked in a field of chocobos again when he saw Selphie, curled up next to him with too much blood staining her yellow jumper. Irvine tried to leap upright, tried to reach for a Cure spell and nearly fell flat on his face when his head threatened to split apart, vision swimming with stars. He bowed his head over bent knees and waited until the world settled down again. Head, limbs, and tongue still attached, but everything else felt bruised like he’d gone a few rounds with a professional boxer. Or a Sorceress.
Soon he was able to move to his hands and knees and drag himself to Selphie. The floor underneath them was dark and glasslike, not unlike obsidian, and they appeared to be in an enormous vaulted chamber of the same material. It was cold underneath Irvine’s hands – must’ve lost his gloves, don’t know how that happened – and Selphie was too pale, her skin chilled when Irvine put a hand against her shoulder.
“Selphie,” he tried, then coughed violently when the words dragged in throat like barbed wire and too much whiskey. He managed to turn to the side before he retched, stomach practically climbing up his spine and blood dripping thickly off his lips. Wiping his face against his sleeve, he reached out for Selphie again, who was lying on her side in the curve of a parenthesis and her hair fanned across her face. Irvine knew it was a bad idea to move someone who might have a snapped spine or broken ribs or massive internal hemorrhaging, because face it, Jenova hadn’t exactly pulled her punches, but he desperately wanted to see her face properly, see the rise and fall of a chest still able to breathe. Instead he put a hand in hers.
“Selphie, please,” he tried again, I don’t want to be alone here.
Her fingers tightened, just a little, over his own, and he nearly sobbed in relief.
“Irvine,” she murmured breathlessly, “what…”
“Don’t move just yet, darlin’, you ain’t exactly at your best right now. I need to see what’s wrong.”
“Can’t do that…while I’m like this,” she managed between strained breaths, and she tried to turn over onto her back. Her limbs flailed weakly and Irvine quickly braced her shoulder and hip, gently guiding her until she was able to look up at the high vault of the chamber.
“Don’t think…this means you can…take advantage of a lady.”
“A lady, huh?” Irvine said softly as he pulled the knife that all SeeDs carried from his boot – surprised as hell to find it was still there – and started carefully cutting away the fabric over her side. “Guess you have nothing to worry about.”
Selphie managed to stick out her tongue belligerently. The blood made the gash in Selphie’s side look worse than it actually was, thank Hyne, looking more like a bruise to shame all other bruises with the skin split messily at its epicenter. It wasn’t deep enough to have reached bone, but muscle was definitely torn and Irvine had a feeling a rib or three might be cracked.
“What’s the…damage, doc?”
“Pretty bad, but you’ll live to see another festival.” His voice came out more, gods forbid, tender than he’d meant. “Looks like the Shell took the brunt of it, although…you should still be bleeding. Looks like it’s already stopped.” Wound like that, there should still be some leaking of bodily fluids, or if not, at least some scabbing or cauterization or something. But there wasn’t, as though Selphie’s body had shrugged and said, Meh, I’m bored, and wandered off to do something else and completely forgotten about the physical damage.
“I’m a…walking natural wonder,” Selphie wheezed.
“I don’t know about the walking part,” Irvine said dryly, turning his head away again as he coughed up what felt like a lung. He wasn’t Junctioned to anything, mostly because he was an idiot and figured he didn’t need one of those creepy things rooting around in his head for what had appeared to be mostly a search-and-bring-back mission, but he had some Cure spells that –
Apparently did nothing.
Staring blankly at his hands, Irvine tried again, willing the magic to find the damage to Selphie and fix it, but the energy just fizzled out like water tossed over hot coals. There was no Shell – or Protect, or Reflect, or any other sort of barrier, so it couldn’t be that, except it wasn’t working.
“Irvine?” Selphie whispered.
“Guess we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, darlin’.” He packed the material he’d cut from her jumper against the wound, then sliced the bottom of his coat (with a small prayer of grief) into long strips to bind it while telling himself it was going to be all right, a few missed Cures wasn’t anything to worry about as long as she wasn’t gushing blood.
“Where are we?” she asked, and Irvine shrugged. It took some delicate maneuvering to sit her upright, and the rest of his coat went around her shoulders. It was cool in the chamber, but not overly so. “I remember…trains, and Rinoa…some kind of magic attack.” She paused for a breath. “Oh, I…I don’t feel Strange Vision in my belt. Do you…have Exeter?”
“Just the knife in my boot.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Just a bit banged up, nothing to worry about.”
“You sound…like a frog,” she giggled, which turned into a hacking cough, which in turn pulled out ragged moans as her ribs were jarred, which in turn was making Irvine panic while trying to pretend to he wasn’t. Selphie wasn’t blind, though, beat to hell as she was, and she said, “I can hear you…hating on yourself up from here. You’re starting to…act like Squall.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” he said quietly, and she replied, “We wait until I remember what it…feels like to be vaguely human. Then we go…kick some alien ass.”
…
my son
mother needs you
…
So the SeeDs had this thing called Junctioning, and they had classes on it that talked about compatibility, magic, summoning and the like. It was regularly discussed with a big red warning label on the cover: MAY CAUSE AMNESIA (OTHER MENTAL SIDE-EFFECTS LIKELY).
What was not discussed was why, exactly, loss of memory (and other mental side-effects) might be a risk in inviting a Guardian Force into one’s head. The brain is a complicated organ made of little fiddly bits called neurons, and which functions on hormones like neurostransmitters and elements like potassium, and which benefits greatly from energy like electricity. Energy is a pretty big deal with brains, really, and since magic is also a type of energy – well. If the other SeeDs had known that Squall wasn’t only Junctioned to Shiva on a regular basis but was actually never not Junctioned anymore, his social illiteracy would swiftly become the least of their worries in regards to his sanity. Since Squall had no intention of letting her go and it would only make the others panic, he was doing everyone a favor by just not saying anything, and if having Shiva around soothed the hole in heart left by his Sorceress (no, Rinoa, she may have been his Sorceress but she’d been more than that) then that was his business and no one else’s.
That said, even Squall, one of the main inspirations for Timber’s popular Idiot’s Guide to Emotional Repression and The Minimalist’s Spoken Word, couldn’t deny the rush that was Shiva borrowing his strength for her own, forging and freezing it into the lethal glitter of her Diamond Dust. Now that they were on the ground in the midst of battle Squall could see that there were fewer monsters than he’d thought; the trouble was their size (big) and the difficulty of killing them (really fucking difficult). A shot that could’ve dropped a wendigo instead got a roar or a flail and something that might have passed for a sulk on something more humanoid, but dear Hyne it was better than paperwork, better than sporadically stolen hours in the Training Room and Squall had missed this.
The pounding of a heartbeat in his ears and the hedonistic satisfaction of physical exertion nearly kept Squall from feeling a foreign pulse of something in his head that wasn’t Shiva’s bloodthirsty glee. He tripped over a tentacle, distracted, and was caught in Shiva’s arms, as cold and stiff as a corpse’s.
squall
The voice was jarring and about as subtle as a brick to the head. He shook his head drunkenly and almost toppled over again when Shiva suddenly faded in a cold prismatic mist, sliding back into the space she’d made for herself in his head with an uncharacteristic lack of finesse. Squall was barely able to duck and roll to avoid a swipe of claws.
reunion
That voice made him see poison-green edging his peripheral vision. There were things snapping inside of him like violin strings and he hadn’t even known he could feel things like that. It was the same force that had ripped him out of his dream with Shiva the night he’d gotten that call from Esthar, and like that night Shiva started howling with fury and with half-formed words like leave and mine and monster. Squall’s vision briefly went white when Shiva’s power met the voice and they collided with the force of opposing trains.
Come with me, Knight.
He fucking knew that would come back to bite him in the ass.
squall i need you
The voice pulled on the magic that Squall instinctively knew made him a Knight and he screamed, some distant part of him remembering being chained against a wall and electrocuted and another bit wondering if his ribcage was going to go supernova. Shiva was torn out of him and the space left behind was flooded with putrid poison-green and –
Love.
…
Seifer heard a human and vaguely familiar scream before the world tunneled and a yell was wrenched from his own throat. Hyperion clattered heavily to the ground as he fell on his knees, hands gripping the hair at his temples and mouth held wide in a silent ‘O.’
…
Cloud felt it a moment before it happened. Having some experience with spontaneous blackouts and moments of insanity, he kicked away a monster and ducked into a convenient narrow alley before the familiar pain gripped his skull like a vise. The metaphor ‘as familiar as a lover’s touch’ was unfortunately rather literal.
my puppet
…
Quistis, Zell, and Dollet’s people watched as every one of the surviving monsters suddenly dropped dead where it stood (or flew, or slithered).
“What the hell just happened?” Quistis asked faintly, prodding a corpse with the toe of a boot.
Zell blinked and said, “Fuck if I know.”
…
There were a few rare places on the Planet where the Lifestream still welled up, not in weak magic draw points but in enormous fountains of liquid crystal, forming pools that harbored raw, slow-growing crystal materia. Since Neo-Midgar had become Midgar-Esthar and then had finally dropped the first name before sealing itself away from the world, materia use had eventually been phased out and the mako pools left untouched for centuries; so when Mother came calling, her kid had plenty of materials with which to work in one such pool.
my son
The crystals ringing the mako spring cracked sharply.
mother needs you
The cracks fanned out like spider webs until the crystals shattered.
Hello, Mother.
chapter 11 || main post || ...
Imperfect Tense
Chapter 12
FF7/8 || R - sexuality, battle violence, language || Squall/Seifer, Sephiroth/Cloud || crossover
Jenova's legacy, living on through the Sorceresses, is forcing Squall to deal with an unstable Seifer, Cloud Strife, and yet another potential end of the world. Maybe paperwork really wasn't so bad.
Word Count: 2,900
12.
“CHAOS?” Quistis repeated, because not everyone had voices in their heads to explain things that didn’t make sense, but Cloud was already a blur of motion, barking, “Zell, take her down to the outermost flank of the monsters opposite the big flying thing. Be ready – we don’t know if these monsters are immune to materia or physical attacks or something.”
“Materia?” said Squall.
Cloud paused. “Materia. Magic,” he said slowly, his tone clearly wondering if the high-altitude pressure had gotten to him.
“I’ve got Ifrit,” Zell volunteered. Ragnarok bucked harshly, making hands shoot out to grab onto the nearest stable surface, and he colorfully cursed all airborne monsters. Cloud staggered back upright, looking like he’d dropped his stomach in the cargo bay, and started rummaging around in the many pockets of his trousers.
“I have Quezacotl and Siren,” Quistis added briskly. “I made sure to pick them up before we left, since Squall already has Shiva.”
After a moment of silent staring, Cloud shook his head in puzzlement and made an ‘a-ha!’ face, pulling several small orbs out of a random pocket. They looked like large marbles and glowed in a way that reminded Squall uncomfortably of the shine to Cloud’s eyes. Cloud drew his oversized sword and slipped the marbles into small spherical slots just above the hilt, giving the blade the shine of elemental magic.
Shiva shifted in the back of Squall’s mind, whispering, We fight, my lion.
When Ragnarok reached a low enough altitude, Cloud opened the hatch and yelled over the sudden rush of air, “Let’s mosey.”
Then he jumped, blade already swinging. Squall resisted the urge to smack a palm against his own forehead.
…
Wind screamed through Cloud’s ears and stole the breath from his lungs. He instinctively twisted as he fell, Ultima already filthy with the strange colors of monster guts and Zack whooping with excitement. Even Sephiroth wasn’t immune and he curved Cloud’s lips into a grim smile.
The ground rushed towards him like a speeding train and he whirled Ultima above his head, bringing it down and shattering pavement into three long fault-lines that took out a herd of grat-malboro-somethings. They exploded in a way that gleefully reminded Zack of cherry bombs in ShinRa’s water pipes and Sephiroth snapped that they were somewhat busy, please stay on topic, Lieutenant.
CHAOS’ familiar bellow shook Cloud’s bones as he settled into the heavy flow of mako coursing through his veins, making him vaguely wonder why he couldn’t hear the solid thumps of Tifa’s fists or the jangle of Nanaki’s combs. Under the instinctive action-reaction of battle he could feel a pull deep in his ribcage, wrapping around his heart and calling reunionreunionreunion, and if there had been any doubt that Jenova – Rinoa, a Sorceress, that’s what Squall called her – was here, there was no need to guess anymore.
A freezing wind swept over the street feeling suspiciously like Shiva’s Diamond Dust. Cloud risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the ice goddess happily slaughtering the monsters with icy needles and icicles that shot out of the ground into soft underbellies. Anyone that was well-versed in stoicism would have seen the borderline-psychotic satisfaction Squall was taking in violence, and Zack took the opportunity to point out that this was what happened you became a desk jockey and didn’t get laid often enough.
…
Seifer was feeling a little disturbed. Not because he was witnessing a fair amount of mayhem and destruction, although it was going to be a fucking bitch getting the blood out of his coat, but because he was hearing shit again.
Come, my Knight, let us rule this world as –
At least she’d learned not to pronounce her ‘C’s so hard that they became ‘K’s, or maybe it wasn’t Ultimecia at all but something worse. As what, master and lapdog?
I loved you when no one else did (except that wasn’t entirely true, but don’t think of grey-blue eyes or lost opportunities), I gave you strength –
You gave me betrayal and lost honor, wasn’t even able to go a day without breaking down, fuck you, fuck you, just go away.
The fountain in the center of Dollet’s square was split down the middle, broken pipes flooding the cobblestones and making it difficult to keep one’s footing. Seifer swore as he slipped, but took the opportunity to slide under the guard of a monster, slit its throat, and use his momentum to keep sliding and avoid the rush of blood like a fucking ninja. Unfortunately, this ninja was distracted by the sudden sound of Ragnarok soaring overheard and narrowly missed a claw to the groin.
“Well, fuck me, it worked,” he muttered, wondering if he should be relieved for the backup or pissed that the monsters hadn’t taken out the communication tower before Balamb Garden had gotten the message. Fuck his life, you mess up once and let yourself try to take over the world, no one ever lets you forget it.
(“This doesn’t make us BFFs, Puberty Boy.”)
The sound of Ragnarok was undercut by the roar of a monster Seifer had never seen before, nearly the size of a fucking T-rexaur with wings and a chip on his shoulder, if the way it ploughed into the monsters was any indication. Hyne’s fucking balls. At least it was killing its own kind, for now.
Seifer was exhausted, but it wasn’t all because of the fighting.
…
her monsterchildren were dying and it felt like tiny pinpricks of pain on the surface of her human flesh
my son
it hurts i will kill those that stand before me squall
oh hyne squall please
come to me my son
sephir-
mother needs you
…
The first thing Irvine thought when he woke up was that he’d been on one hell of a weekend bender: roiling stomach, pounding head, muscles that felt like they’d put through a grinder, but at least he still had his clothes.
Then his brain caught up with his memory and he wished he really had woken up naked in a field of chocobos again when he saw Selphie, curled up next to him with too much blood staining her yellow jumper. Irvine tried to leap upright, tried to reach for a Cure spell and nearly fell flat on his face when his head threatened to split apart, vision swimming with stars. He bowed his head over bent knees and waited until the world settled down again. Head, limbs, and tongue still attached, but everything else felt bruised like he’d gone a few rounds with a professional boxer. Or a Sorceress.
Soon he was able to move to his hands and knees and drag himself to Selphie. The floor underneath them was dark and glasslike, not unlike obsidian, and they appeared to be in an enormous vaulted chamber of the same material. It was cold underneath Irvine’s hands – must’ve lost his gloves, don’t know how that happened – and Selphie was too pale, her skin chilled when Irvine put a hand against her shoulder.
“Selphie,” he tried, then coughed violently when the words dragged in throat like barbed wire and too much whiskey. He managed to turn to the side before he retched, stomach practically climbing up his spine and blood dripping thickly off his lips. Wiping his face against his sleeve, he reached out for Selphie again, who was lying on her side in the curve of a parenthesis and her hair fanned across her face. Irvine knew it was a bad idea to move someone who might have a snapped spine or broken ribs or massive internal hemorrhaging, because face it, Jenova hadn’t exactly pulled her punches, but he desperately wanted to see her face properly, see the rise and fall of a chest still able to breathe. Instead he put a hand in hers.
“Selphie, please,” he tried again, I don’t want to be alone here.
Her fingers tightened, just a little, over his own, and he nearly sobbed in relief.
“Irvine,” she murmured breathlessly, “what…”
“Don’t move just yet, darlin’, you ain’t exactly at your best right now. I need to see what’s wrong.”
“Can’t do that…while I’m like this,” she managed between strained breaths, and she tried to turn over onto her back. Her limbs flailed weakly and Irvine quickly braced her shoulder and hip, gently guiding her until she was able to look up at the high vault of the chamber.
“Don’t think…this means you can…take advantage of a lady.”
“A lady, huh?” Irvine said softly as he pulled the knife that all SeeDs carried from his boot – surprised as hell to find it was still there – and started carefully cutting away the fabric over her side. “Guess you have nothing to worry about.”
Selphie managed to stick out her tongue belligerently. The blood made the gash in Selphie’s side look worse than it actually was, thank Hyne, looking more like a bruise to shame all other bruises with the skin split messily at its epicenter. It wasn’t deep enough to have reached bone, but muscle was definitely torn and Irvine had a feeling a rib or three might be cracked.
“What’s the…damage, doc?”
“Pretty bad, but you’ll live to see another festival.” His voice came out more, gods forbid, tender than he’d meant. “Looks like the Shell took the brunt of it, although…you should still be bleeding. Looks like it’s already stopped.” Wound like that, there should still be some leaking of bodily fluids, or if not, at least some scabbing or cauterization or something. But there wasn’t, as though Selphie’s body had shrugged and said, Meh, I’m bored, and wandered off to do something else and completely forgotten about the physical damage.
“I’m a…walking natural wonder,” Selphie wheezed.
“I don’t know about the walking part,” Irvine said dryly, turning his head away again as he coughed up what felt like a lung. He wasn’t Junctioned to anything, mostly because he was an idiot and figured he didn’t need one of those creepy things rooting around in his head for what had appeared to be mostly a search-and-bring-back mission, but he had some Cure spells that –
Apparently did nothing.
Staring blankly at his hands, Irvine tried again, willing the magic to find the damage to Selphie and fix it, but the energy just fizzled out like water tossed over hot coals. There was no Shell – or Protect, or Reflect, or any other sort of barrier, so it couldn’t be that, except it wasn’t working.
“Irvine?” Selphie whispered.
“Guess we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, darlin’.” He packed the material he’d cut from her jumper against the wound, then sliced the bottom of his coat (with a small prayer of grief) into long strips to bind it while telling himself it was going to be all right, a few missed Cures wasn’t anything to worry about as long as she wasn’t gushing blood.
“Where are we?” she asked, and Irvine shrugged. It took some delicate maneuvering to sit her upright, and the rest of his coat went around her shoulders. It was cool in the chamber, but not overly so. “I remember…trains, and Rinoa…some kind of magic attack.” She paused for a breath. “Oh, I…I don’t feel Strange Vision in my belt. Do you…have Exeter?”
“Just the knife in my boot.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Just a bit banged up, nothing to worry about.”
“You sound…like a frog,” she giggled, which turned into a hacking cough, which in turn pulled out ragged moans as her ribs were jarred, which in turn was making Irvine panic while trying to pretend to he wasn’t. Selphie wasn’t blind, though, beat to hell as she was, and she said, “I can hear you…hating on yourself up from here. You’re starting to…act like Squall.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” he said quietly, and she replied, “We wait until I remember what it…feels like to be vaguely human. Then we go…kick some alien ass.”
…
my son
mother needs you
…
So the SeeDs had this thing called Junctioning, and they had classes on it that talked about compatibility, magic, summoning and the like. It was regularly discussed with a big red warning label on the cover: MAY CAUSE AMNESIA (OTHER MENTAL SIDE-EFFECTS LIKELY).
What was not discussed was why, exactly, loss of memory (and other mental side-effects) might be a risk in inviting a Guardian Force into one’s head. The brain is a complicated organ made of little fiddly bits called neurons, and which functions on hormones like neurostransmitters and elements like potassium, and which benefits greatly from energy like electricity. Energy is a pretty big deal with brains, really, and since magic is also a type of energy – well. If the other SeeDs had known that Squall wasn’t only Junctioned to Shiva on a regular basis but was actually never not Junctioned anymore, his social illiteracy would swiftly become the least of their worries in regards to his sanity. Since Squall had no intention of letting her go and it would only make the others panic, he was doing everyone a favor by just not saying anything, and if having Shiva around soothed the hole in heart left by his Sorceress (no, Rinoa, she may have been his Sorceress but she’d been more than that) then that was his business and no one else’s.
That said, even Squall, one of the main inspirations for Timber’s popular Idiot’s Guide to Emotional Repression and The Minimalist’s Spoken Word, couldn’t deny the rush that was Shiva borrowing his strength for her own, forging and freezing it into the lethal glitter of her Diamond Dust. Now that they were on the ground in the midst of battle Squall could see that there were fewer monsters than he’d thought; the trouble was their size (big) and the difficulty of killing them (really fucking difficult). A shot that could’ve dropped a wendigo instead got a roar or a flail and something that might have passed for a sulk on something more humanoid, but dear Hyne it was better than paperwork, better than sporadically stolen hours in the Training Room and Squall had missed this.
The pounding of a heartbeat in his ears and the hedonistic satisfaction of physical exertion nearly kept Squall from feeling a foreign pulse of something in his head that wasn’t Shiva’s bloodthirsty glee. He tripped over a tentacle, distracted, and was caught in Shiva’s arms, as cold and stiff as a corpse’s.
squall
The voice was jarring and about as subtle as a brick to the head. He shook his head drunkenly and almost toppled over again when Shiva suddenly faded in a cold prismatic mist, sliding back into the space she’d made for herself in his head with an uncharacteristic lack of finesse. Squall was barely able to duck and roll to avoid a swipe of claws.
reunion
That voice made him see poison-green edging his peripheral vision. There were things snapping inside of him like violin strings and he hadn’t even known he could feel things like that. It was the same force that had ripped him out of his dream with Shiva the night he’d gotten that call from Esthar, and like that night Shiva started howling with fury and with half-formed words like leave and mine and monster. Squall’s vision briefly went white when Shiva’s power met the voice and they collided with the force of opposing trains.
Come with me, Knight.
He fucking knew that would come back to bite him in the ass.
squall i need you
The voice pulled on the magic that Squall instinctively knew made him a Knight and he screamed, some distant part of him remembering being chained against a wall and electrocuted and another bit wondering if his ribcage was going to go supernova. Shiva was torn out of him and the space left behind was flooded with putrid poison-green and –
Love.
…
Seifer heard a human and vaguely familiar scream before the world tunneled and a yell was wrenched from his own throat. Hyperion clattered heavily to the ground as he fell on his knees, hands gripping the hair at his temples and mouth held wide in a silent ‘O.’
…
Cloud felt it a moment before it happened. Having some experience with spontaneous blackouts and moments of insanity, he kicked away a monster and ducked into a convenient narrow alley before the familiar pain gripped his skull like a vise. The metaphor ‘as familiar as a lover’s touch’ was unfortunately rather literal.
my puppet
…
Quistis, Zell, and Dollet’s people watched as every one of the surviving monsters suddenly dropped dead where it stood (or flew, or slithered).
“What the hell just happened?” Quistis asked faintly, prodding a corpse with the toe of a boot.
Zell blinked and said, “Fuck if I know.”
…
There were a few rare places on the Planet where the Lifestream still welled up, not in weak magic draw points but in enormous fountains of liquid crystal, forming pools that harbored raw, slow-growing crystal materia. Since Neo-Midgar had become Midgar-Esthar and then had finally dropped the first name before sealing itself away from the world, materia use had eventually been phased out and the mako pools left untouched for centuries; so when Mother came calling, her kid had plenty of materials with which to work in one such pool.
my son
The crystals ringing the mako spring cracked sharply.
mother needs you
The cracks fanned out like spider webs until the crystals shattered.
Hello, Mother.
chapter 11 || main post || ...
