take one step & make it count

-irishais-

It will be a cold day in hell before Seifer Almasy apologizes for anything.

xx

The world ends, and somehow it doesn't. They pick up the pieces, they arrest him barging wild-eyed out of a forest in Timber, coat torn to shreds and her laughter still echoing in his brain. Hyperion is a deadweight in his hands; they rip it from his grip before he can kill any of them. It is nine months later before he has the courage to ask his father for it back, and Cid has to tell him no.

The SeeDs that have come for him are all in Balamb blue. He is frankly surprised when they don't simply drive him to a deserted location and put a bullet in his brain. Quick, merciful, a rabid dog put down with a single slug. Garden is nothing if not brutally ruthless in its efficiency.

They take him to a plane. They take him to his father, waiting on Garden's tarmac and looking like he's aged ten years in the last fourteen months. Somehow, Seifer isn't surprised much by that either, because he's got a black eye and a SeeD broke his nose accidentally, and nothing will surprise him anymore.

Kadowaki sets his nose, Kadowaki looks him in the eye and treats him like a person for the first time since time immemorial. She has him hold an ice pack to his face, and the SeeDs that take him down to the brig are instructed to leave it with him, and to dole out little blue cure pills for the pain once every eight hours.

They leave him with the ice pack, but it is forty eight hours before anyone thinks to give him a pill, and the only reason he eats anything at all is because Leonhart isn't an idiot, and Seifer is about dead on his feet anyway. He gets a cup of applesauce, a pb&j, a bottle of water. They won't leave him the tray.

Seifer Almasy is left to rot in that cell for fifteen days before they drag him out blinking into the harsh fluorescent light, give him twenty minutes to shower, order him to dress in what he recognizes as the suit he's worn maybe twice since he bought it. The shirt is loose, the knot in his tie is messy, the jacket is left unbuttoned, and he scratches at the beard growing along his chin on the train ride to Dollet, to the Garden Council.

If they're going to kill him, they could have at least let him shave. Or slit his own throat and spare all of them the expense of a public execution.

He is led to the courtroom, dropped unceremoniously into a hard wooden chair with the accusing eyes of half the world at his back, stares into the TV camera shoved in his face. Let them look. Let them say whatever they want.

(He is sorry, and yet, he isn't.)

They free him on the condition of a tracking chip implanted just above the base of his spine, so he can't dig it out with a knife. They free him.

He is insane, and so they let him loose in the world once again.

Seifer looks for Rinoa as he is ushered from the courtroom, Cid and Edea on his heels and an army of SeeDs holding the media frenzy at bay. He stays in a small office with his parents for close to three hours. They are escorted out the back stairs, down through a winding alley, and Nida Warren has somehow managed to land a helicopter on the skinny bridge a block over. It's an impressive feat; Seifer keeps his mouth shut, and expects someone to push him out somewhere over the ocean.

Cid Kramer can't look his son in the eye as he pushes a wad of five hundred gil into Seifer's hand, closes his fingers around it, hands him the bag that Edea has packed.

It is the closest he gets to a goodbye with either of his parents. He boards the last train to Timber.

No one chases him. No one barges into his private cabin; eventually, as the train rolls along, the tension in his shoulders relaxes just the tiniest bit.

His mother's scent is on everything when Seifer opens the Garden-issue gray duffel bag around hour three, and she has packed him a brown-bagged lunch, tucked in among folded clothes and battered books, socks and underwear and sneakers. Beneath it, sitting on top of a paperback of Centran poetry, is the framed photo taken two summers ago. In it, his face is obscured as he kisses Rinoa's cheek, and her expression has dissolved into delighted laughter.

He wraps it in a t-shirt to keep the picture from breaking, and unwraps the sandwich laden with meat and cheese and mustard before he can think too deeply about what he's going to do when the train reaches that last station.

xx

Rinoa Heartilly blows into town with the changing of the seasons, summer slowly giving away to colorful fall. She is wearing pink when he first sees her, a dress that skims around her knees and her hair is shorter. Garden is in her past, Leonhart is in her past. He learns this from papers, from shitty society magazine he wouldn't otherwise touch but for her face on the cover.

Everyone expects her to go home to Timber, and home she goes.

He dismisses her as a stranger at first (Rinoa's hair is long and dark and once tangled through his fingers), and turns back to the library's abbreviated history section. He is skimming the back of a book on the settlement of Dollet, when she speaks.

Seifer nearly drops the book, bangs it loudly against the edge of the shelf in his attempt to catch it, and this is how she sees him, turning to the source of the disturbance.

The world stops for a handful of seconds.

His face is half-hidden beneath a battered baseball cap; maybe she won't know, maybe she won't see.

She says his name. He forgets how to breathe until she is right up in his personal space, and she looks the same. Stronger, though, in the way she carries herself, and there's that look in her eyes. It's the one SeeDs get, after the first few kills; something crawls up his spine, seeing that in her gaze.

He leaves the book on the shelf.

xx

They spend three hours talking over endless cups of crappy diner coffee- wait, no, Seifer corrects himself, she talks for most of the three hours, he watches her and nods and comments in all the right spots, drinks his coffee for something to do with his hands (in between refills, he shreds the napkin, the paper placemat, and has started on the empty sugar packets Rinoa leaves on the table.)

I'm sorry, he wants to say, and doesn't. What can he apologize for, other than everything?

There is a tenuous fragility between them, something so thin that it vibrates in the space between them with the gentlest motion, the slightest exhale. The world will end, he thinks, and counts it down, three, two, one.

She reaches out and touches his hand, and for the first time in four months and fifteen days, he doesn't flinch from the touch of another person.

xx

He kisses her beneath a dying streetlight.

It has been one year, five months, and three and a half days since he'd broken free of a detention cell and ran off to this very town to save her.

She tastes like peppermints and cherry chap stick and behind it the very vaguest taste of vodka. He kisses her, and she doesn't push him over the bridge and onto the railroad tracks.

He kisses her, and somehow they are pushing through a door, shedding layers and bumping into unfamiliar furniture and Angelo bites the leg of his jeans, tries to haul him away from Rinoa.

Denim is torn; he kicks off his pants and leaves them to Angelo's mercy.

He kisses her in the dark, and his mouth finds arcs and lines and valleys that he thought would be so familiar, and yet are new again. Her nails dig hard into the muscles of his back; the bed squeaks and bangs its headboard against the wall; he wraps his fingers in her short short hair and tugs her head back to run his tongue along her throat.

Her pulse beats like a war drum; he brands her there, leaves his mark. This is real. This is real.

(There are so many things that aren't, lately.)

Something in him begs for more; her skin sings electric and Rinoa pleads incoherent prayers into his ear. Forgive me, he wants to tell her, his hand holding her thigh tight against his waist, forgive me, forgive me.

In the morning, she laughingly shows him a constellation of bruises along her thigh from his grip.

xx

Six years. Six years and they celebrate the new year in kimono at a festival in Esthar, because President Loire has declared the borders open at last. It is new and bright and exciting, but when they turn a corner, he has to stop, because there's the vaguest flash of something.

Something he should atone for.

"What are you looking at?" Rinoa asks, touching his arm, and he cannot say. Seifer shakes it off with a nothing, and wraps his arm around her shoulders, and they continue on their way.

luna-

The fragment of the word skips through his head, sticks and stutters like a record trapped on repeat. It means something, it means everything, it-

They buy ice cream from a peddler with a cart, and he gets distracted with kissing the smear of strawberry off of Rinoa's nose. The moon hangs full and bright overhead, and the world is neon-blue, and everything is alright.

They watch the fireworks bursting overhead in elaborate displays that do much to show off Esthar's technical prowess, and when the final one fades into the suddenly too-dark sky, they walk arm in arm back to the hotel.

No one recognizes him, and there's no reason why they should, here in Esthar, this bizarre disjointed city of dreams.

xx

this is not real this is not real this is not happening.

she stands in front of him, this behemoth of a witch, with her strange skirt and her horns soaked in blood. when she laughs, every minute shatters. this is not real this is not happening.

this is not real this is not real

she doesn't leave, she corners him in his own damn bedroom, small and narrow and the window long ago painted shut, an old faded quilt of Rinoa's on the bed, slipping off sideways as he crabwalks backwards, the nightstand suddenly hard, violent against his spine. it bangs against the wall. the lamp falls, the shade snaps off upon impact; his hand crushes it in his attempt to get away, get back, tunnel into the damn wall if he has to.

and he cowers like he is five, this is not real this is not real, no please no no no.

her nail rakes across his cheek, like rinoa does when she is tired and quiet and nestled in his arms, her fingertip soft against his skin. she does not draw blood; this phantom does, sharp copper that cannot be real it can't be-

this is not

(he pushes a girl in a blue duster ahead of him, his fingers tight along her arm, leather digging into pale skin. there are five bruises when he lets go, when he hands her over, when adel bellows in rapture, draws rinoa toward her, devours her)

real.

His moan is of a dying man; Rinoa finds him there three hours later, when he has missed their date and nine phone calls and four texts, huddled up in the deepening shadows of nightfall, and she has to coax him slowly out, inch by inch and word by word, and she doesn't even have to ask.

She knows.

i'm sorry, he babbles, i'm sorry, i'm sorry i'm so so so sorry.

Her arms are around him, her hand moving along his back, you're okay, you're alright and he clings to her like he is drowning.

"I forgive you," Rinoa whispers in his ear.

Why?