A/N: For (on Livejournal) twilightsrain's Irvine Fanwork-A-Thon.

Ghosts

-irishais-

He couldn't remember her name the next morning, but she was pretty and left in a reasonably fuss-free way, so Irvine decided he wasn't too hung up on it and headed to the caf for breakfast. It took two days before another one offered up a night's proposition he would have been stupid to refuse, so he didn't. When Irvine didn't call her the next day, she wrote the word "manslut" in the girls' bathroom.

Martine told him of "distressing" rumors that had started to spread about him, and Irvine nodded and said "Yes, sir," and generally did all the right things in the meeting so that he came out innocent.

There was a week in which he kept it strictly to flirting, but his resolve didn't hold. His bed was cold, and he was dreaming again.

So he found a pretty girl and the ghosts subsided.

The next night, he killed a man in Trabia, picked up a woman in a bar, and the cycle repeated itself until one night, there was a pretty girl and there were still the ghosts.

He didn't get it. It had worked perfectly fine, and he decided it couldn't be the girl, because she had been pretty even when the drinks had worn off. He thought he was broken, and so he asked his roommate.

"You kill people. You're going to have to deal with it."

"What, like therapy?"

"I don't know. Have you seen my Triple Triad deck?"

The first time he had gone to the Garden-appointed counselor, he had lied his way through twenty minutes of the session before she asked him if he was a pathological liar or if he just didn't want to be here. Irvine told her he didn't want to be here.

It took three sessions before she prescribed him some sleeping pills. It took two days of being late to class and a plummeting appetite before he tossed the bottle in a drawer and said to hell with it.

The therapist told him sex was his way of coping with death. He told her, "No shit." She wasn't very good at this psychoanalyzing thing. He skipped dinner and took the next train out to Deling City. He bought a woman with short dark hair a drink, brought out his success-guaranteed pick up lines and she smiled and nodded in a way that bordered on pity.

The first time he kissed her, it was like his brain went on sensory overload.

"You've got too many demons that you haven't faced," she told him afterward, tracing patterns that tingled in her finger's wake across his chest.

"You have no idea."

"I can help."

He wasn't so sure about that, and when he finally fell asleep, he dreamed in a jerky, jumbled manner, a hundred faces he didn't know and some he did flashing across his conscious. He suddenly knew everything about them, everything from their pets to their children's names, and it was that that finally woke him, sent him reeling to the toilet where he vomited and she stroked his forehead and told him it would get better.

When he woke next, he couldn't remember anything. He got back to Galbadia, locked himself in his room, and didn't come out for four days. It was an order of immediate dismissal from Martine that finally hauled him out from hiding, where he endured the questions, the stares and the whispers from his classmates. Irvine did his homework, went to his classes, and finally started eating normally again, but when he flirted, it was forced. He didn't trust them, he didn't know what that woman in Deling had done to him, but he didn't trust the pretty girls anymore.

"Nice to see you've gotten your act together," the headmaster said, and sent him to kill another man.