Chapter Text
The world ends, not with a bang, but with a bone-jarring impact.
Squall Leonhart lays there, stunned for a moment. Sitting up doesn’t help very much, overwhelmed by the sudden, complete disorientation of his surroundings, like he’s walked back into his dorm room, only to turn on the light and find that someone has rearranged all the furniture.
All around him, red rock desert stretches for miles in every direction. Desolate. Empty.
The dull, directionless light comes from everywhere and nowhere, a movie set lit just enough to chase away some shadows, without telling him a damn thing about the place. It feels like a stretch of Centra, wrapped in fog.
(It feels like the vast void of space.)
When he shouts for someone, for anyone, his voice has no timbre, no reverb, falling as flat as a lead balloon the second it comes out of his mouth.
He turns in a complete three-sixty, carving a heel-turn circle in the dirt at his feet. Everything looks the same, everywhere just red, dusty nothingness. Eventually, he picks a direction at random, just to start walking. To feel like he’s doing something.
There’s no feeling of it being the right way out. No big flashing sign, reading YOU ARE HERE.
He’s certainly fucking here.
He walks for a while, an hour, two, four-- not that he trusts his own sense of time, considering that here, time doesn’t seem to have any meaning.
Besides, he’d lost his watch several battles ago, smashed against a rock and rendered useless. He doubts it’d tell him anything, anyway; instead, he wonders if the faint white noise that buzzes in his ear, sounding so much like wind whistling, or the crash of the sea at low-tide, is just his imagination, or the ringing result of a concussion that still beats and bangs around in his skull. Fighting Ultimecia and all her little clones hadn’t been easy by any stretch.
It’s a wonder he’s not dead.
Although, knowing his luck at this point, he probably is. He’s probably a cooling corpse on the floor of Ultimecia’s castle, and so are all his friends.
(Optimistic, Leonhart.)
He tells the little voice in his head to go fuck itself, and keeps moving, Lionheart feeling heavier by the second in his hand. It’s all he can do to keep the tip of the blade from dragging along the ground; after what feels like an eternity of trudging along, he thinks that letting it score a line in the dust might have been a good idea after all— a way to retrace his steps, a way to get back to... what? The middle of nowhere he’d woken up in, feeling like he’d fallen ten miles out of the sky and somehow landed with all his bones more or less intact?
(Discounting, of course, the fact that he’s screwed something up in his left leg, pulled his right shoulder with all those hard follow-through swings-- Kadowaki may get to yell at him about rotator cuff exercises for the thousandth time after all.
If he ever gets his chance to see her again, of course. It wouldn’t be the biggest loss in the world, not having to darken the infirmary door anymore, but at least it’d be someone, somewhere familiar.)
He is so goddamned tired of walking.
“Rinoa!” he yells, just to break up the monotony, his voice finding nothing to echo off of, falling flat in front of him again. He might as well be saying nothing, but it feels good to shout, to feel his chest heave with the effort.
“Selphie! Trepe! Irvine— hell, Xu, if you’re out there, I’ll give you Commander if you come and get me—”
She’s going to have it anyway, he thinks sourly, when no one responds. He hadn’t expected anyone to, but still. Would’ve been nice to have some kind of hope. He’s going to die here, and Xu’s going to be commander like she’s always wanted (like she’s always told anyone in earshot who would listen), and Rinoa will never know what happened to him, because he’s failed her, he’s failed everyone.
Squall walks, and walks, and walks, and walks.
--
She comes back to life in a meadow, lush with wildflowers and tall grass, inhaling the scent of spring gone sour.
Rinoa shifts, groans, eases herself upright, her wings hanging heavy from her back, useless, draped across her like a blanket.
This is probably what birds feel like when they slam into glass. She doesn’t know where the thought comes from, but the mood of it is apt, all things considered.
It is more work than it normally takes to pull them back in, to drop the manifestation of her recently-acquired gift, the magic receding back deep into her bones. But she pushes onward, trying until she feels the weight disappear, the feathers whispering as they vanish, the cool retreat of the whorls of silver just starting to skate across her cheeks.
After a while, she feels less like a bird, a sorceress, a monster, and more like seventeen-pushing-eighteen Rinoa Heartilly, half-sprawled in a field she doesn’t recognize.
It’s probably not a smart idea to be herself right now; any of the others would tell her off for removing her easiest method of defense in the event of an attack (god, she’s starting to sound like a SeeD cadet) but Rinoa is exhausted, and not a SeeD, and the weight off her shoulders is a relief . She pushes herself to her knees, then to one foot, then the other. Her balance is unsteady; the world moves in slow, disorienting circles for a scary moment before equilibrium settles again, and she’s able to look at her surroundings for real.
Grass, flowers, sky rotten with a lingering storm that refuses to break.
She is alone.
Oh, my god, I’m alone.
It is a traumatizing, paralyzing thought-- don’t leave me, she whispers to Squall, tucked beneath his arm by a dying campfire one of innumerable nights, and holds onto his I won’t as a talisman against reality as she takes a few steps forward. She has never done well on her own, always stubborn and strong, but always surrounded by friends.
The ground is solid beneath her shoes, the earth doesn’t devour her, nothing comes out of the grass to try to kill her. She takes the first deep, shaking breath she’s been able to catch since they walked into the imposing foyer of Ultimecia’s nightmare palace, and keeps going.
“Squall!” she shouts, and the wind picks up his name, carrying it off into the thunderclouds that roil and rage overhead. There is no reply.
She’s alone.
It gets colder the further she walks; Rinoa hunches in on herself, pulling her arm warmers down lower over her fingers, filthy blue knit a lost cause beneath the dirt and blood and road debris.
When I get out of here, I’m burning this whole outfit, she decides, and it’s resolution enough to keep one foot in front of the other, even as the sky darkens further and further with every step she takes. Because she will get out of here. She has to.
She yells Squall’s name again.
This time, she catches the glimpse of a shadow in the distance.
--
He bellows her name, again, again, again.
The world ends, eventually, for real this time, red desert turning to gray desolation turning to a rounded-off cliff practically inviting him to leap over the edge of it.
Squall sits, because there’s not much else he can do at this point, dropping down, body heavy, Lionheart coming to clatter on the stone next to him.
That’s it.
He’s dead.
He’ll have, what? A couple days? He can’t remember how long a person can go without water (weeks without food, he knows, but water’s vital, and the gray dust has already sucked most of the moisture from his mouth during his endless trek), but it doesn’t really matter, because he’ll find out soon enough, right?
Maybe three days tops, and maybe he can just convince his body that it’s time to give up now. Eighteen years was a decent enough run, even if he only really made it through seventeen of them, birthday recent enough that he can still remember the hideously rainbow cake that Selphie had found in a grocery store on one of their rest breaks.
He’d been looking forward to eighteen, honestly. Legally old enough to enjoy life, not just follow the whims and rules of Garden faculty-- he could take that fresh SeeD paycheck, go check out the world without a war on. Get drunk somewhere that isn’t a dorm room, on real drinks, with real friends, not vodka smuggled into their rooms in repurposed water bottles and canteens. Legally old enough to move out on his own without a guardian’s signature on a requisition form for off-campus housing.
Eighteen, and a fat lot of good it’s done him now.
Killed Ultimecia, I guess. Beat Quistis at Triple Triad. Found out my dad’s not dead.
He leans back on his palms, and looks up into the swirling dark overhead. Already, it’s getting harder to breathe.
Sorry, Rinoa. Sorry, everyone.
He almost misses the white feather swirling down from the sky, landing softly in the black leather of his glove. Squall closes his fingers around it; when he opens them again, the feather has turned to dust.
--
The shadow gets closer; she runs toward it, towards him-- Rinoa’s boots are nearly soundless against the lush grass, her heart pounding in her chest, her lungs struggling to pull enough air out of the void, and it feels like she’s trying to push through molasses.
But that’s Squall, that’s Squall, she’d know his silhouette anywhere, the dark of his hair and the breadth of his shoulders.
She screams his name.
He falls backwards against the gray stone, and doesn’t move.
The world implodes around her, time spun forward and backwards at the same time, kompression, Ultimecia cackles into the aether around her, all existence denied.
Her storm grows darker and deeper, her storm will drown them both if Rinoa can’t get through.
This time, she thinks that her magic won’t respond, body so tired and wired on exhaustion and fear, only that she has to try anyway. Her arms fling out in front of her; the power rips through her fingertips without warning, almost searing as she flings it forward, boiling up her veins like a supernova.
The veil between them explodes.
She doesn’t even wait for the spell to cool down, to recall, just hurls herself into the gaping nothing between them, screaming his name over and over again in wild desperation.
Don’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you’re not allowed to leave me--
(you’re going to like me, you’re going to like me)
The ground comes with her, stretching a bridge beneath her feet, grass and wildflowers crashing onto rocky gray shore as she runs, but she barely notices that she’s pulling the whole meadow along with her, just that the distance seems far longer than it had at first glance, that her lungs burn and her chest heaves and sweat sprouts on her brow, until the end comes abruptly.
Her knees hit the stone hard enough to scrape open the top layer of flesh, blood smearing scarlet against it, eaten up just as quickly in the onslaught of nature. When she lifts him in her arms, awkwardly, unsteadily, he isn’t moving. He doesn’t open his eyes.
Her head falls to his mouth-- there’s no breath that ruffles her hair, no whisper of her name. She shifts him, ear to his chest.
There’s no heartbeat.
“No,” she says firmly to the still air, the liminal space around them, the emptiness that threatens to consume her-- no, she says, to the whole damn universe; woe betide anyone who crosses Rinoa Heartilly in pursuit of what she wants, even if it's time and space itself she needs to fight. “You can’t have him.”
The life spell flows beneath her palms, white-hot-- behind her, her wings burst forth and unfurl, stretched wide around them like a shield. Another sorceress, another witch. It doesn’t matter what she’s called, how the world might turn against her, or what this reckless magic will do to her.
She doesn’t care, just focuses as hard as she can, casting and casting and casting until the secure thread of it abruptly slips from her grip, and she is no longer channeling, but pouring it into Squall, stardust sinking into his dirty t-shirt, his leather coat, his skin. She loses control of it entirely, unable to get her fingers around that thread again, forced to give up trying to stem any kind of tide.
He can have all of it, every last drop, even as the chaotic loss leaves her feverish and trembling.
She’ll burn on a pyre, if that’s what it takes to save him.
--
The magic slips into his chest, warm like April sunshine after heavy rain, glittering red as it glides along muscle, sinew, seeking deeper, seeking more; it becomes less sunshine, more inferno-- he can’t escape it, can’t hope to try.
The wildfire finds Shiva, asleep in his brain, and dissolves her, melting ice down into something else, something limitless, infinite, spreading her residual cold with its heat-- save him, save him, save him.
The magic has one instruction, one order from its ruler, and it obeys with alacrity, even if it means abandoning her entirely to complete it. Save him.
Save him.
It unspools its red thread from the neurons in his brain to the nerves in tired, worn-down feet; eventually, with only a few inches left, does the magic settle into its new home among his cells.
He is suffused with sun and ice, summer warming his dead heart, winter shocking it back to life.
(The magic has known many vessels; he will serve just as well as all the others.)
--
The storm recedes, the sky blue and bright in its wake; the world is born again.
In the distance, she recognizes Winhill. Reality begins to tick-tock forward again, time marching away from this one collapsed infinity. It is easier to breathe, even with his body heavy in her arms, like letting go has left her born anew.
So, when she finally allows herself to look down at him, it doesn’t surprise her at all to see color slowly coming back to his cheeks, dark lashes moving slightly, eyes opening. He is beautiful in life, so much so that it makes her want to weep.
“Rin,” he croaks out, as if he’s surprised to see her there at all. When he finally blinks away the fog, his eyes are not gray like the sea, but gray like the light of stars. This is the price she paid, one gift given freely from her very soul. “What ha--”
“You promised you wouldn’t leave,” she accuses him, but it comes out choked up and laughing all at the same time as she strokes back hair from his exhausted, pale face.
She is crying, and he is struggling to sit up and hold her, and they end up tangled in each other’s grasp, desperately, wearily happy just to be alive.