Work Text:
you’re-going-to-like-me
He is seventeen and the world stretches in a straight, narrow road ahead of him, gridded like the dance floor, vertical like the girl’s finger in his face, wagging back and forth, back and forth.
you’re-going-to-like-me
The X-ATMO’s thundering, spidering legs sound like the endless galloping of the couples swirling the floor, SeeDs, faculty, cadets-- he wonders how long they would last if that thing were trapped in here with them, a fresh horror-show for the nightly news.
“You’re the best-looking guy here,” she says, and she’s cute enough, weird enough that Squall knows she doesn’t go to this particular school (no faculty would have let her in the room with a dress that short if she were a student.)
Let loose. Have fun. God, don’t you ever just relax? His roommate is back in the dorm, he knows, or out at the docks getting drunk with the locals, because his exam isn’t until next semester. Lucky bastard. Nothing’s going to change for him.
Squall chugs the last of his champagne, drops the glass, and lets himself be pulled into the fray.
you’re-going-to-like-me
--
“Squall,” she whispers, letting her fingers run gently down his cheek, back through the deep brown of his hair. Here, there is nothing, a stretch of hellish eternity, and she sees his bootprints in the dust from where she’s landed on her knees at his side.
How far had he walked? How long had he managed to go before he couldn’t anymore?
This can’t be the end.
They’ve done everything. They’ve come from stumbling steps and fireworks and fights and parades and endless walking... she’s survived space, left drifting to die until the Ragnarok had crested over the horizon, a blessing as bright as the sun.
One minute of oxygen remaining, a cold mechanical voice whispers in her ear, and Rinoa scrubs at her eyes with one blue-clad forearm, bowing over him, because he can’t be dead. This isn’t how it ends.
It’s not allowed.
You can’t have him, she tells the unspeakable hell around them; her magic sings like the heavens in her veins.
She presses her lips against Squall’s cold mouth.
--
Someone slams a potion down his throat, Zell’s fingers closing over his mouth and nose so Squall is forced to swallow it, coming back to jarring wakefulness with the muffled scream of someone whose bones are snapping back together at a rapid-fire pace. He chokes down the last of the potion, scrambling to his feet as the gash across his chest and several of his ribs knit themselves whole again.
“Go!” he bellows, pushing Zell away, back toward the fight (all the fights, all the battles, he’s tired, just let him rest for five seconds). But Rinoa’s up there, hanging from Adel’s chest like a perverse crucifixion; Squall’s been knocked down, he’ll get back up, there’s no way he’d just leave her like that.
They’ve come this far. He’ll go forever, down that long, winding road that leads to her.
Squall takes a half-second, catches his breath, gets his bearings. Lionheart is ripped up off the floor, and he bellows as he charges, feeling his own blood splash up into his face like rain.
This is not the end. He won’t allow it.
--
She is seventeen, and the world is on fire, the colorful blaze of Timber’s forests a riot of reds, oranges, even pinks at the edges, the trees bloom and blossom and die and do it all over again, and yet she will never stop thinking that this is the prettiest sight in the world.
Rinoa thinks she could stay there forever, but the train pulls into the station, and she boards it with a single bag and the invitation to a SeeD ball with Cid Kramer’s contact information scribbled on the back, and leaves it all behind.
The world stretches out before her, train tracks crisscrossing the earth-- she wonders if she’ll see Seifer there, and wonders if she even wants to.
Nothing lasts forever, but the favor he’s done her is unprecedented, the offer to come help with her resistance the second he graduates either ego or simple fact (it had always been hard to tell with him.)
So, when she shows up at Balamb Garden’s gate that evening with her little clutch purse and her thick white card, the latter clamped between her lips as she roots into the former for her driver’s license, Rinoa really isn’t sure what to expect at all.
None of the prospects she can think of include the taciturn, newly-minted SeeD with his glass of champagne, glaring around the room like it owes him money, but that’s what fate’s roulette wheel lands on, and she’s distracted from her search for the headmaster almost as soon as it’s started.
you’re the best looking guy here. dance with me?
--
(you’re-going-to-like-me
her face shifts and warps and vanishes into a void, and he can’t find the breath to scream.
you’re-going-to-like-me
she is faceless, she is emptiness, she is ultimecia’s death-knell cackle because they might have killed her but she’s trapped them all in her web, and when the monster wearing rinoa’s face leans forward for a kiss, he recoils--
please, god, no, he is only seventeen and this is too goddamned much --)
--
In a flower field just outside of Winhill, she breathes Squall Leonhart back to life.
He comes to with a sudden jerk and thrash, gray eyes wide, panicked, locking on hers and his fingers come up frozen-cold against her cheeks.
“You’re alive,” he whispers hoarsely, and he touches her like he’s afraid she’s going to shatter like glass. Her hand wraps around his own, and holds him fast, an anchor to this point in time-- she can't lose him again, not when she's just gotten him back, and if that means never letting go again...
“So are you,” Rinoa whispers back.
--
(you're-going-to-like-me--
--did it work?)