Disclaimer: I make no claim whatsoever to the characters or world of Final Fantasy VIII, which is the property of Squaresoft/Square Enix.

Chapter I

In a corridor in North Deling General Hospital, in the chilly early hours of a Tuesday morning, Irvine Kinneas slipped his wide-brimmed black stetson off his head and clutched it to his chest with one hand. He double-checked the removable name plate attached to the wall, which read Mr. E. Kinneas, and noted the small red letters at one corner: DNR. Irvine knew what that meant. A Do Not Resuscitate order. He took an unsteady breath and pushed the thin blue curtain to one side.

The man lying in the bed moved slightly, and Irvine saw that there were tubes leading to several electrodes on his chest, and another tube connecting an intravenous drip to his left arm. Ernest's thin face was barely a shell of the man Irvine knew and loved, sunken, sallow and paper-like, but his keen blue eyes met Irvine's with the same warmth they always had.

"Hey, gramps." He walked over to the bed and brushed Ernest's withered fingers gently with his own. "Sorry I took so long gettin' here. Wasn't sure if I'd make it in time."

Ernest managed a small smile. "Couldn't go until I talked to you, Irv," he rasped, wincing painfully.

Irvine stroked his hand and shushed him. "Don't try to speak if it hurts."

"I gotta. I gotta say... sorry."

Irvine's lips twisted into a lopsided smile. "You can't help dying, gramps."

Ernest moved his head very slightly from side to side. "Not that." He took a slow, laborious breath. "You'll inherit something from me that... Well, it'll be a shock, Irv."

"You been squirrelin' away the cash for me or somethin'? I'm touched."

Ernest shook his head again. "She would've gone to your dad, if he hadn't died first. You're still so young... It'll be a long road for you."

"She?"

Irvine felt Ernest's fingers squeeze his hand weakly. "Irv, don't resent her. It's not her fault. Just try to get along." His grandfather's eyes drifted off towards the foot of the bed, and he smiled fondly. "Ah, come on, Selphie. You know that's not what I meant."

Irvine stared at his grandfather. His mind's going. It can't be long now. "What, gramps? Who's Selphie?"

Ernest smiled faintly. "You'll find out as soon as I go, lad. And I really am... sorry." His eyes fluttered closed, and Irvine watched numbly as the rise and fall of Ernest's skinny chest became slower and slower, then stilled altogether.

The heart monitor let out a long, uninterrupted tone, and Irvine closed his eyes. He'd been an orphan for almost twenty years, but he'd never truly felt it until this moment. Ernest Kinneas, the man who had raised him, was no more, and it... hurt. Hurt like hell.

He sensed a flash of color at his side and turned, startled, to see a petite young woman in a bright yellow sundress, her mid-length brown hair flicking up improbably high at the ends. Her tear-stricken face was fixed on Ernest's pale body.

"Where the hell did you come from?" Irvine blurted out in shock.

"Ta-da," she said weakly, and made a half-hearted attempt at jazz hands. A tear dripped off her chin as she turned her gaze back to the bed. "Oh Ernie... I can't believe you've really gone."

"What- what? Who are you?"

"Selphie Tilmitt. I've known you since you were a baby, but... well, you don't know me." She wiped her wet face with a dainty hand and shot a swift glance at the curtain that demarcated the room off from the corridor to the main ward. "Listen, Irvy. The heart monitor is linked up with the computer in the nurses' office. They'll know by now that he's passed. One of them will come in here any minute. She won't be able to see me. Just act normal. I'll explain when we're alone."

He stared at her blankly. "What? What are you talking about?"

He heard the sound of the curtain hooks scraping along the rail, and a nurse, a tall, middle-aged woman in pale pink scrubs, entered the room.

"Excuse me, sir." She walked to Ernest's side and held two fingers to the side of his neck, then gave a small nod; to herself, Irvine thought.

The nurse stepped back and stood barely an inch away from Selphie, without acknowledging her at all. Selphie raised her eyebrows at Irvine in an I-told-you-so sort of way.

"I'm very sorry for your loss, Mr. Kinneas."

"Thank you, ma'am."

She held his gaze, and Irvine could muster some admiration for the genuine sympathy in her eyes; she must have this conversation almost every day of the year, after all. "Please take as long as you like to say goodbye. When you're ready, come to the desk and I'll give you a run-through of the documents you'll need to register the death. Once the paperwork is signed, Mr. Kinneas Senior will be moved to the morgue."

He nodded. "Understood. Thank you."

She departed and closed the curtain gently, and Irvine heard her footsteps fade away. He looked at Selphie suspiciously. "She really couldn't see you."

"Nope."

"So... what? Am I supposed to believe you're some kind of ghost?"

Selphie fiddled with her hair. "Well... technically, no, because I never actually died. But for all intents and purposes, I guess you can think of me as the Kinneas family ghost."

"What the... hell?"

"It's a long story. I'll explain in the car."

Irvine bristled at her assumption. "At what point did I invite you into my car?"

"Sorry, Irvy. You don't have a choice." She gave a sad smile. "Let's focus on paying our respects to Ernie right now, okay?"

"Our respects?"

"Yes," she said firmly, and turned to gaze sorrowfully at Ernest.

They stood in silence for a long while, and Irvine felt a tear trickle slowly down his own face. He stepped closer to the bed and laid a soft kiss on Ernest's forehead. "So long, gramps." His voice broke.

Selphie's head was bowed. "I'm going to miss you, Ern." Under her breath, she added bitterly, "You lucky, lucky bastard. Going the one place I can never follow."

Irvine blinked his way through the nurse's explanation of Ernest's death certificate, thoroughly distracted by the sounds of Selphie's muffled sobs from two feet or so behind him. Jamming his cowboy hat back on his head, he walked in a daze back through the corridor and down the stairs, dimly aware of the yellow blur floating gently behind him like a giant butterfly. He didn't turn around. If I ignore her, she'll go away, he told himself somewhat desperately. He crossed over to his car, one of the few vehicles in the almost-empty parking lot at this ungodly hour, and quickly got in, pointedly refusing to open the passenger door for Selphie.

He lurched sideways with shock when she emerged through the closed door, wafting through it as if she were made of smoke, and neatly resolidified as soon as she reached the passenger seat.

"What the hell did you just do?" he spluttered.

Selphie had the gall to look affronted. "Well, excuse me! It's not like I can grab the handle, is it?"

Irvine turned the key in the ignition, and the engine started to hum. "All right, start talking. Who are you?"

Selphie twisted one of her huge, bouncy curls round a forefinger as she appeared to mull over where to begin. "Do you know much about your great-great-grandfather? Herbert E. Kinneas?"

Irvine steered the car out of the parking lot and onto the deserted road. "Gramps' grandfather? The treasure hunter, right? Not a lot."

"Did you ever hear that he lost the use of his legs for two years?"

"No." He glanced at her with irritation. "Any chance you could get to the point sometime soon?"

"Okay." She spread her arms out wide, the fingers of her left hand passing cleanly through Irvine's ponytail. "Picture the scene. It is the summer of my nineteenth year, in the last golden days of the great Holy Dollet Empire, three decades before the devastating Lunar Cry of-"

"Cut the melodramatics. I'm pretty short on patience right now," he warned.

Selphie pouted. "Ugh, fine. So my best friend, Herbie, comes to my house with another one of his crazy ideas. He's heard about a lost treasure hoard rumored to be hidden in a tomb in North Centra. I'm even more crazy, so I say 'pack your bag, for we leave tonight!'. We take the ferry to Centra and start exploring the tomb. Half a day in, we get to an intersection of two paths. One way gives me an eerie feeling, so I say let's take the other. Herbie disagrees. I say I'm not budging. He says let's toss a coin for it. We do. I win. But then Herbie gets that goddamn reckless Kinneas glint in his eye, grabs my wrist, and drags me towards the path I don't want to go down."

She narrowed her eyes and glared at the empty road in front.

"And then?" Irvine prompted.

"We take a few steps, and the floor of the tomb cracks and collapses under us. Herbie manages to hold onto part of a ledge. I'm hanging onto his ankle, dangling above this huge dark cavern underneath me." Selphie gave a small shudder. "Then something starts moving down below. I look down, and it's pitch black, but I can somehow see this... this... thing. Black wings and... claws. It sends out this beam of black light, if that makes sense, which goes straight through me, and I feel like - like - " She shook her head. "No, I've never been able to describe it. But the next thing I know, my hand goes straight through Herbie's ankle. I can't grab hold of anything, I'm just... floating."

"So you died?"

Selphie's brow creased into a frown. "But Irvy, I didn't. I would have noticed if I had, don't you think? I would've drifted away from my body, or something. It would have hurt. I'm not dead. I'm just... cut off from the world."

"What happened next?"

"Herbie's lost all feeling in both of his legs, so he crawls back to the tomb entrance on his arms, with me screaming at him all the while that I can't touch anything, I can't feel the ground. We get back to the nearest town, eventually. That's where we realize that only Herbie can see and hear me. No-one else."

"And it just stayed like that?"

She nodded. "I watched Herbie recover the ability to walk, then marry, have kids, grow into an old man, and when he died, your great-grandpa Travis turned to me and said 'Who the hell are you?'. And so it continued for a hundred and twenty years, and... here we are."

Irvine frowned as he steered the car round a sharp corner. "I don't get it. Is it just the Kinneas men?"

"It seems to go through the bloodline, to the eldest child. It just so happens that they were all boys so far. When your mom was pregnant with you, I was really hoping you'd be a girl." She smiled brightly at him. "No offense."

"So what happens if I die without having any kids? I'm in the military. That could easily happen. Hell, I've been shot twice."

Selphie pursed her lips. "I've wondered that for a long time. No idea. Personally I hope that I'd wink out of existence, but knowing my luck I'd probably go to your idiot cousin Randy."

"And are you always there? Don't I get a break?"

"Yeah, um..." Selphie scratched her nose. "Sorry, Irvy. We can't go more than about fifty feet away from each other."

"Why not?"

She shrugged. "Just can't. Try it if you want. It's like gravity or something."

"That's..." Irvine trailed off, thoroughly appalled.

"I mean, I'm not a total third wheel. Ernie barred me from the bedroom when your grandma was still alive. I always used to go to another room. So I'll make myself scarce during your, y'know, shenanigans."

Irvine raised an eyebrow. "Shenanigans?"

"When you want to spend some special time with a lady." She eyed his ponytail thoughtfully. "Or a gentleman caller. I don't judge."

"It'll be ladies," he said firmly. "And I should damn well think so. I also want you to promise right now that you'll give me privacy in the bathroom," he added as an afterthought.

Selphie looked surprised at this request. "All right, if that's what you want. But I bet you won't care after a couple of decades. Ernie and I had some of our best conversations when he was taking a shi-"

Irvine lifted one hand up from the wheel and tilted it towards her face. "I do not want to hear the end of that sentence."

"Please yourself," she huffed.

They drove on in silence for a few minutes before Irvine asked, "Why didn't he tell me about you years ago? I could've used a little more preparation."

"Would you have believed him?"

He considered this. "...No."

"Well, there's your answer, Irvy. He felt bad about it, believe me."

Irvine turned onto Vinzer Deling Boulevard, where the streetlights were partially obscured by the spreading branches of the broad Galbadian plane trees. "This is too weird. You're weird. A freak."

Selphie rounded on him, her green eyes dark with fury. "Watch your mouth, young lad! I'm undead, forever, because of your great-great-grandfather's incompetence! You think this is the life I would have chosen for myself? Huh? Huh?"

He kept his eyes on the road and shook his head. "You're a stress-induced hallucination. I'm deranged with grief."

She let out a sigh. "This is just as strange for me as it is for you, y'know."

Irvine snorted. "I sincerely doubt that."

"But it is. The idea of getting used to a new person, after having only Ernie to talk to for the last forty-three years... We were practically part of each other. It's like someone chopped off my leg and said 'here, have a new one.'"

He shot her a sidelong glance. "You're comparing me to a leg?"

She looked him up and down. "Maybe more of an arm. You're all lanky and... elbowy."

Irvine didn't feel that this was worthy of a response, and the last ten minutes of the drive were mercifully quiet as Selphie stared out of the window into the early dawn light.

The sun was almost fully risen by the time he had parked and was walking up the steps to his third-floor apartment. Irvine paused by the door and turned to face Selphie wearily. "I guess you're comin' in, then."

Her eyes creased up in an apologetic smile. "If it makes it feel any less intrusive, I'll wait for you to invite me."

Irvine thought this over for a moment, and briefly considered slamming the door in her face for a few hours; but mired in the fog of his exhaustion, he simply gave up. "Selphie, would you like to come in?"

She beamed at him gratefully. "Yes, please."

A/N: I should be finishing my other story right now, but this fic went and barged itself into my psyche in the last few days with a Selphie-esque ferocity, so here it is. Irvine/Selphie stories don't seem to be particularly popular on here, so I'm wondering if anyone will actually read this (although there will be a bit of Squinoa later on, if that helps...!). If you did, and you enjoyed it, please let me know and I'll keep writing! Needless to say that doesn't mean I'm abandoning Eye of the Storm - an update on that story is coming soon. Thank you for reading! -colobonema