not breathing (not dead)

-irishais-

A/N: Gift fic for corollary, for Final Fantasy Exchange 2010.

The coffee is the same, the mug is the same, and the place mat with its paper ads and weekly specials is the same.

His hands are the only things that have changed, it seems—wrinkles fold up around his knuckles, veins becoming apparent under rough skin, nails clipped nearly to the quick. The hair on his arms stands out against a tan that seems to never go away, like it's been tattooed there. It's all the fishing, he thinks.

When had he gotten so old?

What went wrong? What happened to the glorious death in battle, with a worthy opponent's sword in his chest and the black, screaming, beating wings of a sorceress finally escaping his head as everything—stops.

He stares at his hands, at the patchy rough skin, the layers of old scars from a gunblade's sharp edge, from the workshop, where an intricate rocking chair is half built and waiting— it's the only thing that keeps him near sane, the building, the disassembling, the rebuilding.

His hands shake a little as he picks up the little plastic pots of creamer and opens them one by one, pouring them into the dark, bitter coffee. He has to stop, look at them, make sure they're really doing what he thinks they're doing, and when he realizes that his hands won't stop trembling, he feels betrayed.

They don't know him here, not so many generations later, thirty years from the last war and all they know is peace and music and getting drunk and trashy movies. They don't know that his bank account is silently padded every month by a dead man's will, a last request to a mercenary organization that officially no longer exists.

They don't know that the woman who slips into the booth across from him is a ghost. The waitress brings her a tea; she stirs a bit of honey and lemon into it, and sips.

He cannot bring himself to say her name, or to say anything. Something inside of him has stalled out. The ceramic mug is hard under his hands and he has forgotten what he was doing.

She smiles, gently, and he is eight and eighteen and forty-eight years old all at once.

"It's good to see you, Seifer," she says.

It was easy to find you, Seifer, the voice in his head whispers.

She stirs her tea and waits for an answer, only he doesn't have anything for this ghost in the vinyl bench seat.

"Why did you want to see me?" he settles for, and his voice is rough and deep (and terrified, but he won't admit it, won't let it show. He is older, but he is not weak. Not a boy.)

-boy or man boy or man-

"I wanted to make sure you were doing well," she says. "You never answered my letter."

It's a fact, not an accusation. The letter sits, read a thousand times, under a stack of books in his bedroom.

He looks at her cautiously; she is a hundred years old and looks thirty-two. When he looks in the mirror in the morning, he thinks that the reflection is what his father would have looked like.

A headache is building up behind his temples.

"Stop that," he says.

"What?"

"That...thing." He gestures to his head. "Stop." He can't form the words, can't make the sentences go the way he wants them to. Five minutes in her presence, and he's reduced to a lap dog again.

"I'm not doing anything, Seifer," she tells him gently. "But I can go if you want me to."

There, that tone in her voice, a mother talking down to her child. She did not give birth to him but holds him fast to her with the tether of a mother-lover-ghost.

I am not a child!, he wants to scream, and smash his cup against the flecked-plastic table.

But he shakes his head and mumbles about some appointment (some lie), sliding out of the booth with an apology only half-sincere.

He pays for her tea at the register before he leaves, and deliberately doesn't look in the window of the diner as he walks down the street as fast as he can, but he can feel her eyes on his retreating back, her perfect vision tracking him as he disappears down the road into the crowds.

None of them pay attention to the old man with the faded scar between his eyes as he gets into an old battered two-seater car and drives away.

xx

His house is a tiny split-level in a development of identical tiny split-levels. He has lived in it for nearly ten years, the longest he has ever put down roots for, and as Seifer sits in his basement with a piece of fine-grit sandpaper, going over and over the curved leg of a rocking chair, he thinks it might be time to move.

-the crashing of waves against the steel shore and all you ever wanted—

He drops the leg.

It has been thirty years since she slipped herself inside of him, a black spot curling around his heart and his brain.

She is supposed to be dead.

He snatches up the phone from its cradle and dials.

xx

The sea is dark and placid, and he stands with two hands holding tight to the door of his car, trying to convince himself to turn around and go back home, except the boat is sitting there, and even from here, he can make out Fujin on board, a sharp, small silhouette in the bright cabin lights.

"Ahoy!" she calls to him, her voice velvet and gun-smoke; he is grateful for the darkness, because she is forty-five and hasn't changed a bit, except for wrinkles around her eye that he doesn't comment on, ever.

The planks of the dock are smooth under his shoes. He boards.

(he does not look back.)

xx

The lighthouse is upon them before he can really comprehend it, a gleaming tower on the horizon.

"Land!" Fujin calls, even though he can see it right there, right in front of his face, and is already turning the boat toward the beach—but oh, how easy it would be to keep turning and go back the way they came.

There is a neat, small pier that they can tie the fishing boat to, and Seifer is the one who jumps the narrow gap, not expecting the impact to be as hard as it is. He brushes it off. Fujin guides the boat in close, and he ties it off. She takes the steel ladder down.

"Wait," he says, and it is a command that neither of them expect, but habits die hard and Fujin nods, once. "I'll be right back," he amends, and there is an apology in his voice. She understands. She's always understood.

The little stone orphanage is scrubbed squeaky clean, with lace curtains in the window, and she is already waiting for him.

It takes an awful lot of willpower to continue putting one foot in front of the other, to drag his feet through the sand.

(hot breath and skin and a veil of black black hair, and she rakes her nails along his spine, he gasps her name, a curse a blessing absolution damnation)

He stops two steps shy of the porch.

"Seifer," she says.

A full minute passes before he can speak; he is old, he is afraid. "Matron—"

It explodes out of his mouth, something devoured and regurgitated, and it hangs in the air. He would give anything to take it back.

She steps off the porch in a fluid dancer's movement, and her arms wrap around him.

"My poor boy," she murmurs; every hair on his neck stands up on end, and he does not move, fists clenched at his sides.

He is forty-eight and eighteen and eight years old all at once. His heart hammers against his ribs, so hard that his flesh will have to give way for it.

I knew you would come back to me, Seifer, she says, and he can feel the dark spot spreading through his chest again.