the lightning strike.

-irishais-

he is haunted by something he cannot define.

Her son screams and thrashes in his bed, panics and flails and it takes two adult SeeDs and Kadowaki with a hypodermic of sedative jabbed into his arm to subdue him. Edea cannot watch, she cannot watch.

The sedative slips under his skin like the fragile white of a diluted sleep spell, and she wonders if it might just be easier if he never wakes up again. Kadowaki has pity in her eyes when she turns away, when the thrashing has subsided, drugged unconsciousness setting in. Edea is awake the rest of the night.

The next time he wakes, he is slow to come out of it, groggy like a newborn. Time slips and slithers and regresses and recedes and slams forward full-force, once he figures out exactly where he is and that he's restrained to his bed. Not even his bed, a narrow infirmary cot, the lights dimmed but the place unmistakable in the scent of its bleached sterility. It is familiar, at least. She relaxes when he does, focused more on the straps around his wrists, restrained like a dog.

"They were afraid you would hurt yourself," Edea explains in slow, halting measures, gesturing toward the thick straps around his wrists. "You were- thrashing. Dr. Kadowaki thought it would be best..." Prattling on and on, trying to justify this, any of this. Her son, in Garden's very small infirmary. Her son, alive and staring at her in medicinally-muted incomprehension, tugging at the straps just to see if they're real.

He won't hurt her. He won't. He is her son.

Edea unfolds herself from the armchair a SeeD has dragged in here from the lobby, something more comfortable than the stools Kadowaki generally provides, and crosses to Seifer, cautious, aware that there's something in his eyes that gleams feral- monster, they call him, murderer.

Her fingers pull at velcro with careful uncertainty; finally she pulls it all off in one go, the sharp tear breaking the quiet of the morning. One arm free, then the other. Aware that as she leans across him to get the second strap that he could rip her heart from her chest.

Seifer freezes at the contact, and Edea draws back as quickly as she can, trying her best not to touch him unnecessarily. This is what got them in this mess to begin with, isn't it? A hand on his shoulder, his around her throat.

"-Um." He speaks, and thinks better of it, mouth slamming shut like a trap. The animal in him paces across his green-glass eyes, a wolf trapped in a grown man's body. He was so small, once upon a time. Tiny and prematurely born, and fragile.

Edea tries to smile, forces it across her face.

"I'm fine," she assures him, aware there are bruises fading on her neck, feeling him track them with his gaze. "I shouldn't have startled you."

Cid doesn't want her down here, afraid that Seifer will do something worse, thrashing as he is taken from their apartment in custody, handcuffed and put under Kadowaki's ward as a psych case. Her son is not a monster. And he is her child, and this is is her fault. Her defense is the only reason that he isn't in the brig again.

Only time will tell if he is ever going to be normal, able to be her boy again, the child she threw to the clawing, screaming, hellbent monsters of Garden and left for ten years to save a different child. Keep him safe, she had begged Cid, cripple his chances of making full SeeD, of dying in the battlefield in glory and blood and mayhem.

Squall was destined to fight Ultimecia. Seifer was never supposed to throw himself headlong into that war, never meant to be a broken knight torn apart at the mercy of a witch. Two witches.

(For she is a monster, too, the dark spot where her magic once sat bleeding ink-stained want in her chest.)

"I'm sorry," her son says. The words come out small, defenseless, afraid. (I fear nothing, he sneers in reckless bravado more than once, Hyperion in his hand and the world at his feet.)

"No, no, you have nothing to apologize for, nothing-" She reaches for his face, to stroke back his dirty, blond hair from where it has fallen in his eyes, and he flinches from her touch.

This child named for peace, a pawn used up in war. Edea braces herself against the weeping that wants to rip free; she is not afraid, she cannot be afraid. Her children need her. Her child needs her.

This boy, parents dead in the first War and hers the moment he was laid in her arms. The boy who fills all the pictures in the apartment she and Cid share in a remote corner of Garden, the child whose unworn, unearned, tailor-fit SeeD uniform sits high up in Cid's corner of the closet, wrapped in white tissue and still stored in the dry-cleaner's box.

Please take care of our boy.

"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere," she tells him, the witch and the knight, and the bond is as good as fealty sworn, something stirring in her veins and his heartbeat suddenly loud in her ears.

Seifer remains still in his blood-stained t-shirt, scar crinkling between his eyes, hands flat on the white-white-white hospital sheet. There is the ghost of a beard along his jaw, a hardness in thin-drawn lips that Edea aches to see. He is grown up, and he is lost.

The sun dawns blood-bright outside the window, spilling itself over Balamb, a full-cure wiping away the night and the terrors it has brought. He looks so much older in the light. Nineteen, nineteen sometime during the war.

Time, it will not wait (it will always escape you).

Please let me help you.

She tried so hard to save him.

She tried so hard to save him.

And now look at the wounded beast he has become.