The following is a work of fanfiction. The character(s) and worlds depicted within it are not in any way mine: Final Fantasy is the property of Squaresoft, as far as I'm aware. The song this is named for and takes inspiration from is also not mine, but Hefner's, and the lyrics I have generally refrained from quoting are by Darren Hayman.
This is also a work of yuri, or femslash: it contains girls with girls in romantic/sexual relationships, and also reference to female anatomy. What's more, according to the laws of some countries, both girls are probably underage: but, then, where I come from we never had laws about female homosexual relationships, and as they stand now I think they count as legal. If the very idea does not appeal to you, or you are underage, it might be wiser not to read it: the back button is your friend. Just a suggestion, you understand.

hymn for the cigarettes.

Nothing in this world is sexier than a girl smoking in your bed. Especially if she's naked under the sheet she's self-consciously wrapped around herself, your sheet, and she's gazing out of the window pensively, and bites the tip of her thumb in between taking a drag and exhaling the smoke, and when she does it clouds all around her like an aura. I'm perversely glad that she barely ever smokes in front of the other students, because that makes it all mine, that stare of thought she makes when no-one's watching, that hand that pinches the bone on her nose where her spectacles would be, if they were not sitting folded on the bedside table.

I put them aside, last night, and she fretted at me to place them the right way up because otherwise they would scratch and she would have to wear the other pair, the pair that make her face so severe and studious-looking. She's shortsighted, she told me long ago, and later, as I moved back to draw the sheet over her cold legs, she pulled me back up with a whispered "don't leave my sight" and leaned in to help, one breast bumping against my shoulder and her breath warm on my ear. When the sheet was up to my shoulders she grinned, suddenly, and dived back to draw it all the way over until we were both tented under the white, and she tucked it behind her head and flipped me round and brought me up flat against her, on top of her, grabbing my wrists and holding them at her sides, and dropped a tiny kiss on my forehead.

"Sleep well," she whispered, but I can't sleep face down, especially not face down to her chest, so I had to tear away my hands and push myself up and aside, one arm tracing circles on her stomach before it lay flat over her, exhausted, and I slept nestled up against her side.

In the morning she was lying in just the same position, with the sheet rucked down, which meant one of us must have moved in the night at some point. It was probably me, considering that I woke up with my head on her collarbone. I shifted, unglued her hand from the small of my back, smelt the air and reached for a cigarette to mask the reek of sweat.

I always woke before her, when we were cadets together and sharing a room: and we would be up before everyone else, whispering together as we copied each other's homework. It became our ritual, seeing in the dawn under the light of halogen torches while muttering about tactics and geometry. She was the first roommate I had ever had who understood my love of mornings; who was never pushed in at midnight, mulish, by a scowling member of the disciplinary committe and sought to spread her misery by turning on the light and waking me up. Maybe that was because she was younger, not in the same petulant state of adolescence as everyone else in our class. Maybe it was just because she was special - is special.

She has never realised it - no matter how many times I could tell her, she will only laugh and squeeze my hand and think that I am merely flattering her.

Last night, she danced with more people than I can count - with half the class, stammering or smirking and their eyes not always fixed to her face; with our old instructor, who told her she was going to be a credit to SeeD; with Headmaster Cid, even. But in between the dances she sat with me, and even in the middle of them she would look up and smile, and I wanted to push myself away from the wall, tap her partner on the shoulder and claim her as mine. I taught her to dance, I wanted to say, I led her through the steps when she was adolescent and awkward and none of you would have looked twice at her, and when she tripped over my feet we would collapse on the floor, giggling, and dance no more. I have more right to stand against her and whisper in her ear than any of you could, even though she has grown more graceful than anyone, and more beautiful.

Instead I exercised the proper restraint that every SeeD must learn, and found myself leaving at the seventh partner's flashed grin and proffered hand.

The balcony outside was cool and empty, too early for the couples who sneak out to take their flirting to a level you would never think SeeD uniforms would allow. There, elbows cold on the parquet, I could watch the darkened woods through a cloud of smoke that got into my eyes and made me blink, and hear the faint edges of the music that she was dancing to. When she came out, the air around me shifted and grew warmer. She rested her arms on my shoulders.

"Tired?" She asked.

"Thinking." The heat from her body seeped into my back, and I could not help but press back into it.

"Come and dance. No wonder you're moping if you spend your whole time sitting at the side."

"Who with? You're taken."

Her laugh curled around my vertebrae on its way out of her mouth, and she wrapped herself around me.

"Fine. See you later?"

I never expected that later to come so soon.

I never expected to see her walk into my room after, changed out of the dress she would rarely, if ever, wear again: her uniform had not been ready, too short for her sudden growth into elegance, and she had shone in white among the dark sullen blues. I never expected her to smile and collapse onto my bed like she always had, with the same rush of expelled air. I never expected her to reach for me again.

Her hands are beautiful: the thumb worried between her teeth perfect, white and finely shaped, the nail kept short for the easy wearing of her gloves. She keeps the gloves on most of the time, so her arms barely tan, and the calluses on her fingertips from her whiphandle are minimal enough to only graze faintly over my skin. I still shiver every time she touches me: the faint brushes are enough to make me press in and turn to her wherever we are, and then check myself hurriedly when I realise she has only touched my arm to redirect me on the way into the cafeteria.

She has never understood what it is her hands do to me, the fact that I can sit for hours under the slow tracings of a single finger across my back and never want to leave. That touch - the tiny trickles of heat that slip off her fingertip and roll down my spine, those whispers of air in the space between her hand and my skin - could hold me still and never let me up for a glorious eternity. I only ever want her to stop for fear of tiring her arm out: there is only so much time she can hold it raised like that and not get bored.

Of course, she will get bored eventually: but not yet, not quite yet.

The kettle boils - Hyne save the amenities they grant full SeeD - and I slowly prepare coffee to solidify our morning, to make it real. When I clamber onto my bed she throws cigarette butts and ashes out of the window, and lets the sheet fall in reaching for her mug. My own mug steams and watches me from its place on the nightstand, disapproving as any member of the Faculty, as I pull away my shirt and fit myself into the curve of her arm. To wear it would have been to lose something, to lose that feeling of each charge running to its respective earth.

We are used to close quarters, her and I, used to pillowing one another in narrow cadet beds and me held against her to share in her warmth. It needs no words for me to light her another cigarette and bring it up to her lips, and none for her to kiss the palm of my hand before she takes it.

It feels like forgiveness: for my leaving her ball last night, for my ever doubting that I would see her back, for my sitting over the kettle and thinking about her when she was right here in front of me to hold and not worry over. Because I make statements before I know they are wrong: and her breathing smoke against my ear, one arm slung low around my hips, and the sheet tangled across our legs but there are no hands free to pick it up for a modesty we do not need: there is nothing sexier than that.

intellectual property of harpy_elian, december 2000