There goes my hero,

watch him as he goes.

There goes my hero,

he's ordinary.

-Foo Fighters, "Hero"

_._

Garden docks in Balamb the day after the victory celebration. There are rumors that Sefier was seen, and Squall has decided it is better for them to find him, than a citizen who doesn't trust the system and has their own ideas about justice.

Zell excuses himself from the manhunt. He says he's not sure he could act responsibly if he's the one who finds Seifer, and he' s not sure he's ready to deal with questions from people at home. Squall nods, Rinoa looks at him with concern, and Selphie grabs his hand and pulls him towards the quad, chattering about how now he'll be free to help her with cleaning the place up.

They depart that night, without Seifer. Zell is deep in the training center when departure calls are made, and between the thick palm leaves and angry cries of Rex, he misses the alert on his comm-device, and stands firmly by that excuse.

That's what he has, while Garden is mobile-excuses. And they are good excuses, real excuses. They would almost even be reasons, except one day he finds Rinoa in the library and she asks him, in that almost creepy, see-straight-through-you way she has of looking past people's bluffs, if he's afraid to go home.

He mutters something about needing to meet someone and going to the wrong place and leaves, and doesn't look back to see her watching him with eyes demanding honesty. She doesn't bring it up again, and he almost wishes she would.

The next time they dock in Balamb, it has been four weeks since leaving Ultimecia's Castle, and Zell stands on a hill overlooking the town with his heart in his throat and an unprecedented urge to run away.

Are you afraid to go home?

There are no excuses, now. They will be here for the better part of the month, and the town of Balamb has never been blind to the looming shadow of Garden sitting at the foot of the mountains. He's already avoided it long enough that he's probably made things even worse, and he knows that no matter how hard it's going to be, it's not worth what he is doing to the person he would do anything to protect.

And in his silence, he has done anything but protect her.

"Zell!"

"Dincht! You're alive!"

"Hey-if it isn't the Hero of Balamb!"

Zell waves and grins at the voices as he walks through town, but doesn't stop to talk. He could spend an entire day on the street with a growing audience if he wanted, spinning tales of glory, but that's not how he wants to start this trip. Within three blocks he has had two people offer to take him for a drink, and Ransley "Big Bad Rascal" Donovan pops and starts running circles around him, eager to hear about all the gory details of the war.

"It was so awesome when the fighting came here!" the Rascal says. "Like, real-time fighting! I bet it was like that all the time, right?!"

"All the time," Zell says, with less enthusiasm than he wishes he could muster. He is two doors down now, and if her window is open the way it usually is, the Rascal's voice has carried in, and his arrival will not be a surprise.

"I can't wait to hear more-"

"-Hey. I'll catch up with you later, dude. I've got to-"

"Ohh, right, right. Your Ma ain't been herself, since you never stopped in to say-"

"Thanks, Ras. Where will you be later?"

"Come by the shop! We'll go next door, you can make me jealous! Later!"

Zell watches Ransley run towards the docks, and is surprised at how weary he feels after their short exchange. He blames it on nerves, and takes the next few heavy steps towards the familiar front door, and stops.

And the door swings open.

They stare at each other, each second an eternity of silence for every day he didn't even call, and while she has to look up to meet his eye, he feels so small, and so young.

Finally, she speaks. "I hope you weren't thinking of knocking on your own front door."

"I uh-"

"And don't you dare say anything about not being sure if this is still your home. This will always be your home, as long as you have mind to call it that."

He scratches the back of his head, unsure of the right thing to say-and is almost knocked backwards when she throws her arms around him and holds him, the kind of hug that only a mother can ever truly give.

Zell wraps his arms around her, gently. He is certain she is crying, and if he's not sure how to deal with tears to begin with, he is nowhere near prepared to deal with them from his Ma. So he rests his hands against her shoulders, and wonders if there even is a right thing to say.

He expected her to be angry that he hadn't called. He would have been angry. He knows it may still be coming, but he was sure he'd see it right away.

He expected her to look different, for the house to look different, knowing what he knows now. That he would look at her, at his mother, and see a stranger, and wonder that he ever believed they were related by blood.

What he sees, is home.

And what he says, and what he truly means, is, "I'm sorry I didn't come by sooner."

.

After dinner, Zell leaves to walk around town. His plan was to wait until the next day, but after the third interruption from someone who heard he was home (and just wait until he gets his hands on the Rascal), Ma shakes her head and pushes him out the door to make his rounds, and to "go, be a hero."

When he returns home it's late. He has spent the night on the docks, at an impromptu party thrown by his old friends. Thierry, who manages the dock records, has music pumping through the speakers in the harbor, and it feels to Zell like half the town is here. He is the guest of honor and everyone wants to hear him talk about the war, and it is his chance to boast, to shine; to do what he cannot do at Garden, where no one would believe him anyway. Not next to Squall, silent and haunted and the obvious leader of their victory.

But in Balamb, Squall is a SeeD who showed up a couple of times on missions, and helped Zell drive out the occupation when Galbadia came looking for Ellone. Zell is the hero.

He always has been.

He finally leaves well after midnight, and is surprised that Ma is still awake, and ashamed when she tells him she's gone to bed often enough without knowing he's safe, and tonight she didn't have to do that.

He tells her goodnight, and lets her usher him upstairs to his room, and he sits still for a moment listening to her moving around downstairs, locking the door, turning off the TV.

The night has almost been normal.

Zell pulls a pair of athletic shorts out of his dresser and changes, and sits on the edge of his bed and looks around. It's quiet for the first time since he entered the town this afternoon, and there is a peace in the silence he never could have appreciated before. Something was off in the party tonight, and away from the loud music and chatter of people he tries to place it. Compared to dock parties they've had in the past, this one was just a little on the rowdy side of average. More people, and maybe more whooping and hollering, but no one ended up in the water, and the Rascal spent most of his time embellishing Zell's stories and throwing in a few of his own from Balamb's brief occupation, rather than trying to start fights or chasing skirts all night long.

He flops back on the bed and sighs, and his mind wanders to the party at Garden just a few weeks back, and in that, Zell thinks he recognizes the difference.

When he reaches over to turn out his light, his reflection moves across the framed picture of his grandfather on the opposite wall, and Zell props himself up on his elbow and stares for a few minutes.

"You're the reason I did this, you know," he tells the photograph. "And it turns out, I've got no more in common with you than I do with Rinoa's old man."

The man in the picture looks into the room, the cool, competent stare of a soldier.

"Hmph." Zell clicks off the light and lays back, and drifts asleep to the image of his own picture in an impressive frame, and what kind of legacy he might leave behind.

.

Ma has breakfast ready when he comes downstairs the next morning, and hands him a glass of orange juice and asks him about the party. Over pancakes and bacon, he tells her about the night before, and she updates him on everything that's happened in the town since he left.

The occupation, he learns, did more damage than they thought, and Zell is quiet for a few minutes on learning this. It was too dark the night before to see how much work the town still needs, and he thinks of how foolish he was to assume things went back to normal after they drove out Fujin and Raijin.

"There was still some fighting," Ma tells him. "Even within the town. Those two used to be friendly around here, and quite a few people wondered if we weren't wrong to resist them."

"They were under orders from a madman," Zell points out. "Who actually wanted to follow them? I'll be happy to let them know exactly how stupid that was." He thinks of the night before. How many of the people who came to celebrate his homecoming had opposed his mission? The thought is infuriating, and Zell curls his fist on top of the table.

It does not go unnoticed.

"Zell, it's over. No matter what people thought then, they figured it out before it was too late."

"Someone should have called us," he says. "SeeD could have come back and helped fix things. It was half our fault, anyway."

We, he thinks. Us. It's strange to refer to himself as separate from this place, this town that has always given him such a sense of pride. Strange, but he knows, he is separate. In a way he's not sure can ever change.

Ma smiles at him sadly, and he wonders if she isn't thinking the same thing.

But you've always known. I'm not really from here.

He shakes his head, and has missed the first part of her answer.

"-cost, and no one here has ever wanted to rely on Garden, you know that."

"Ma, Garden's right next door. Of everywhere in the world Balamb should know better than anyone there's nothing wrong with hiring SeeD. Thanks to field training there's hardly any monsters to worry about, plus I overheard Xu saying something about the money Garden gives to Balamb for transportation, since we use the train station and docks so much. Balamb's a Garden town, might as well take advantage of that."

"Who's Xu?" is all she asks, and Zell sighs.

"She led the field mission I took to become a SeeD. She's like…Squall's second-in-command now."

"That must be hard for her."

"What?"

"Didn't he take his field exam at the same time you did? It must be hard for her to report to someone she used to outrank."

"Oh…" Zell frowns. It's strange to hear someone talk about Xu who doesn't know her. He's pretty sure Xu would hate that. "I guess. But seriously, I can come out here with Selphie, Quistis, and Irvine sometime. He's not even SeeD, so if anyone asks it's not a SeeD contract. Just some friends helping out. We owe this town that much. I'll talk to Thierry this afternoon, see what he thinks."

Ma nods, and gives him a distant look. It's one he recognizes; she wore it when he told her he wanted to go to Garden, when he said he planned to sit for the SeeD exam, and the day he left Balamb on his first mission to Timber. He looks away from her and studies the streak of syrup drying on his plate, and stands, and starts clearing the table.

It's a mother's look, he thinks. He saw it on Matron when they realized Squall had abandoned Garden and was taking Rinoa to Esthar, and later, when they agreed to Esthar's plan to defeat Ultimecia. Something born from love and, Zell thinks, longing. From knowing that things can never be as they once were.

He wonders if he has worn that look since he arrived. He wants to bring it up-to ask her why she never told him he was adopted, to ask him if she knows anything about his birth family, but now that he's back it seems like such a stupid request. This is the house he grew up in. And it doesn't matter how old he was when he got here, or what his life was like before, this is his life now-but he knows, and he feels like she deserves to know that he knows, and he has no idea how to bring it up.

So he doesn't.

Instead he finishes the breakfast dishes, and leaves to go into town and see what kind of damage has really been done. He promises Ma he'll be home for dinner, and sends a message to Squall that he won't be back at Garden until at least the next day. He gets a simple, "Okay" in response, and laughs to himself. In the last twenty four hours of surrealism from being back home, he can at least count on Squall to be predictable.

In town, however, things are nothing like he predicted. To hear Ma talk, he expected to see buildings burned to the ground, streets blown out and cars flipped on their sides. Instead he sees signs not of battles, but of…well, looting.

Dammit, Rascal, he thinks. The comic shop he always loved has boards up over busted windows, and down several streets are lewd images spray-painted on the sides of buildings. He reaches down to pick up a large piece of glass on the sidewalk outside a now-closed lingerie shop and runs his thumb over the flat part of the surface. He wonders how someone as level-headed as his mom could have over-exaggerated things to such a high degree, but then, she didn't exaggerate on anything. Not really. He's just seen so much destruction in the last few months that he jumped immediately to "war-torn" as soon as she said the fighting continued after they left.

Timber, is war-torn. There are more businesses there closed than aren't, and in the short time they were there it was not uncommon to hear bursts of gunfire from Galbadian soldiers pushing the people of Timber into the few spaces they could still walk in open daylight. Garden itself is war-torn; second floor classrooms unsafe to occupy in case the floor falls out from structural damage, the back end of the quad still roped off where a chunk of it fell into the Garden blades. Zell shudders at the memory of Rinoa standing beside him one second and gone the next, and the nightmares he had in the weeks to come of watching her through outstretched fingers, crushed with the rest of the the debris.

"Ouch!"

He looks down, and has cut his finger on the shard of glass.

Balamb isn't war-torn. Balamb is victim to a few rowdy kids taking advantage of the chaos in ways they'd be likely to do anyway, and for the first time since arriving, Zell feels genuine emotion from being back in his hometown, and it's anger.

"You wanna see a real war?" he shouts down the empty street, and his voice comes back to him, hollow and out-of-place. He curls his fist around the glass and feels it cut into his palm, and grits his teeth against the pain and lets it fly. The point hits the eye of a bikini-clad woman staring down at him from the side of the used bookstore, and Zell watches the sun catch the shards as they rain back onto the street.

He hears a door, and the owner of the store holds her hand over her forehead to shade her eyes, and Zell stares at her, no way of hiding that he was the one who yelled.

"…Zell Dincht?" she asks. "I heard you were back. Is everything okay?"

"All good!" He grins at her, and shoves his bleeding hand into his pocket, and his anger along with it. "Just…"

"Surprised?"

"A little. You'd think on a bookstore they could have at least drawn something…bookish. I'm guessing Ransley's behind this?"

"Right in one," she nods. "No one else would take that kind of talent and waste it on being so offensive to women. That pose is ridiculous."

Zell looks up at the graffiti again and laughs. "Looks like the comic shop was looted, guess he used some of those covers for inspiration."

"Strange to hear that, coming from you, Dincht. I remember you buying quite a few of those before you left back in the spring."

He shrugs, and gives her an embarrassed smile. "I've got a friend-a couple of them, actually-they spent an afternoon going through my comics and uh, educating me, to put it nicely, on how unrealistic the poses for women are. I'm a little afraid if I don't hold their position, they'll find out and I'll have hell to pay-and don't laugh, you haven't met these two! One of my buddies still has the scars to prove you don't mess with girls with fingernails!"

She laughs even harder, and Zell finds his anger starting to genuinely subside. He imagines Irvine's reaction to the Rascal's additions to the city, and cringes a little, already anticipating Rinoa using it as an opportunity to soapbox about inequality.

"You know, I can bring some friends out here, help clean things up. Ma didn't seem to think it was worth it, but what would you think? It wouldn't take us long to fix all these busted windows, or paint over Ransley's, uh, art. If we're calling it that."

She grows quiet, and they look together down the street. Other than the graffiti, her shop is little worse for the wear, but the boarded up storefronts and debris in the street is a hard sight to stomach. Beside him, the bookseller sighs.

"Balamb's different, Zell," she says. "I wouldn't care, but I'm not speaking on anyone's behalf. You all came in before and kicked Galbadia out, but a lot of people here won't forget it was Garden students at the helm, or how quickly you all left once the fighting stopped."

"We had to-"

"-But did you? That entire boat full of mercenaries, and you in the inner circle of the guy running the place-not to mention the handful of other Balamb natives who went to Garden to follow in your footsteps. You couldn't spare a few people to stay behind?"

Zell is quiet. His hand is throbbing and his head is spinning, and he thinks back to the day Garden left. Didn't they leave someone behind? But he can't remember it even coming up in conversation. They started to talk, and Selphie said she wanted to go to Trabia, and off to Trabia they went.

Embarrassed, he mumbles, "Squall wasn't in charge then."

"What?"

"Squall-Commander Leonhart. He didn't take up command until a few days later."

She laughs, bitter this time. It sounds harsh against the genuine laughter from moments before. "Zell, anyone here just needed one look at that man to know who was in charge. He might not have known it, but he could have asked for this city in gold and someone would have found a way to do it. He exuded 'Don't Fuck With Me.' And more than that…why didn't you stay?"

"Because-" but he stops. Because he was under orders? Because there was too much going on, too much happening too quickly? Because…

Because by then, your loyalty wasn't just to Balamb.

"It's okay, Zell. Like I said-I've got nothing against you or Garden, and I hear last night a lot of people came out to express the same thing. But you're thinking about coming in and helping from Garden's point of view. Just…don't forget to think about things from our point of view too, okay?"

"You got it."

She smiles at him, and waves before walking back into her shop. He pulls his hand out of his pocket and stretches his fingers, sticky with blood, and hangs his head.

He changes his mind about going to see Thierry, and heads north instead. It doesn't feel right to want to train, not when he's supposed to be here on leave, and not when there's nothing outside the city worth training on anyway, but he can pull a few Cures out of something to take care of his hand if nothing else, and it's better than staying in town and running into Ransley. He reaches up and plugs in the feed that links him to the Brothers, and on the edge of town, he pauses.

When, he wonders, did he stop thinking about things from Balamb's point of view?

Part 1 of my submission for The Successor challenge. I intended to post this all at once, but time keeps getting away from me, so this is proof that I am actually working on something! Part 2 will be up by the end of August, but I can't begin to predict more than that.