Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy 8 or any of its characters. The franchise was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the characters by Tetsuya Normura, and it is all owned and licensed by Square Enix. No money was made in the creation or distribution of this story.

“Clarity”

The one thing he could focus on was the smell of the smoke. Somewhere, the plains of Esthar were burning, and that heavy, acrid scent clung to the strangely cool wind as it whipped his hair. It stained the splinter of moon that had emerged out of the somber August twilight; it gave him just a pinch of a headache right behind his eyes that had managed to cling on all afternoon. Maybe it was just the heat.

He’d come because, somehow, he didn’t know how to say no. Maybe it was the half-curiosity about what a father would say to a son he’d never known. Squall didn’t have much, or rather any, experience in the matter. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Lately, the more he thought of it, the more the whole idea began to itch. Maybe he was afraid once he started, he’d scratch it raw. He should have come on the condition that they not speak of it.

Scaling a green hill, he shrugged the white fur collar on his jacket up closer to his bare neck, half squirming in his skin. It was suspiciously cold for August, especially for Esthar, but strangling humidity crawled down his back like sticky insects. Autumn was sneaking up quietly; already the short summer shadows were elongating and the winds had grown more bitter than expected.

Squall shifted his weight uneasily and returned his reluctant attention to the man who knelt at the flat, gray stone that lay embedded in the dark hill, only a few yards away. He was silent in reverent mourning, staring down at the name and having his own memories, no doubt. Memories Squall didn’t have. Not of the woman in the grave, in any case.

He'd had never understood the point of mourning the dead. It seemed absurd, but then he supposed so was just about everything else. Things were just that way. They were either to be accepted or begrudged, but never denied. Mourning was just another, more ludicrous form of denying the truth.

The mourning man rose to his feet, slipping his nervous hands in the pockets of his beige slacks and shaking the errant strands of his hair away from his face. He did not turn around.

"Hi Squall."

With a perverse twinge of insubordination, he waded through the grass toward…his father. They had met only a day or so before. They, so far, did not discuss the blaring evidence of Laguna’s paternity toward Squall, and the boy preferred it that way. Such a discussion would be long and awkward, and above all, it would solve nothing. However, it seemed that that absurd dialogue was now inevitably upon him, and he could not brush it away. Just the idea of it made Squall cringe.

He nodded a terse greeting toward the short, anxious man, regarding him as coolly as he could. Even though, of late, certain aspects of life had shown themselves in a more appealing light, Squall still harbored his ability to be callous and vitriolic when he felt it necessary. His caustic bitterness would not allow him to see Laguna as innocent regarding the simple fact was that he was his father, but he had wandered off and become the President of alienated Esthar, while his mother died and Squall had grown up in a cold, remote orphanage by the sea. The idea hadn’t really sunk in completely until last night after Laguna had asked him up here; until he’d stared up at the ceiling half the night thinking about the way he’d never known those events had unfolded. Not that it mattered now.

Laguna gazed up at the pale stars, his time creased face relaxed in the colorblind dimness. The silence breathed with the evening wind, the grass seething around their legs. The crimson sky to the west had darkened to a morbid purple, where stars had blinked out behind the thin clouds.

Squall bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from speaking. He had nothing to say, and he would not let himself believe otherwise. This conversation was already over. He dropped his gaze from the unwelcoming sky to the gravestone near his feet. Raine Loire. She had died a long time ago, it did no good to mourn her. She was his mother— but not to him, she wasn’t. Regardless, he couldn’t help the shivering serpents of anger that were roused by the sight of her grave. His mother had died alone, and he had, in turn, been left alone. She was buried here, left apart from the rest of the world, up here in the darkness of the damp soil. Not even Laguna had seen her die.

Not that it mattered now.

"So, is this what you wanted?" Squall heard his own voice inquire. The words came out without his consent, the trembling tenor of his voice pinched with irritation. Squall immediately clenched his jaw in response to the question. It was more of a question he was asking himself, not Laguna.

It wasn’t what he wanted. Almost nothing that fit together to build the skeletal structure of his now eighteen-year-old life was what he wanted, really. He lived by stringent rules; he followed orders to live up to the expectations of Garden, but rarely his own. He did what was asked of him. But then, no one really gets dealt the hand they want, he figured, they just accepted it and fixed it the way they could to make it playable. It hadn’t seemed so bad before, but now, there were so many other things that had reared up in his life, far more important than anything had ever seemed before. There was a different sort of clarity now. There was Rinoa now.

Rinoa. Oh, she was beautiful. She cared what happened to him.

She loved him. She had said so, softly, into his ear that morning when he had awakened beside her in his bed. The cool slide of her naked skin on his had been heaven, her enthralling, methodical movements as she combed her slender fingers through his hair and kissed his parted lips almost surreal. When falling asleep beside her, she had held onto him like a dream she was afraid might escape; as if he might keep her afloat in the darkness and absurdity of the world. Squall smiled inadvertently. She was the one wonderful thing he wanted. She made everything else worth it. She was a conduit for a world of new importance.

"Is it what I wanted," Laguna eyed the young mercenary, "for us to stand here saying nothing?" The man shook his head. "No. Not at all. I expected to say something that might…” He gestured emptily with his hands, never quite finding the right version of the word he wanted. “I wanted to…" Laguna lifted a hand to his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose in contemplation, the mauve dust of starlight glinting over his black hair. He looked up, his facial expression almost a shrug. "I wanted to say…I’m sorry."

Before he was even aware, Squall’s gloved hands had tightened into fists at his sides. His back was straight upright, his muscles tense, his jaw suddenly clenched. He tried to breathe in slowly. Somehow he felt like a cat backed up against a wall.

He was…sorry?

That didn’t seem to be the right thing to say at all. He had dictated the entire, ruined course of his life by irresponsibly going off to fight in the war with a pregnant wife, letting his wife die and his son be taken away…and never come back to deal with any of it. And he was…sorry. He was just damn sorry.

Squall felt something inside him boiling. Quick, wicked demons prodded the nerve that Laguna had somehow struck…like a bullet through his heart. He bit his tongue and swallowed the spiteful phrase that was forming on his lips. Maybe the anger came from feeling helpless. Feeling like a child being told something he could never understand.

"Sorry?" His voice wavered with blistering anger. He had never experienced this sort of rage. It was painful, his stomach knotted in fiery slipknots, his body tense. There were too many new emotions awakening from hibernation inside him today. Love, attachment, rage, hate. The ice of apathy had melted away with Rinoa’s kiss, and now boiled off. A chilling gust swiped through his hair and over his neck, ruffling the white fur of his jacket collar, as if it might cool the roaring and unbearable flames of outrage that somehow stupidly inundated him.

Laguna looked at his son. His son that he had never really seen before, only in his memories of beautiful, quiet Raine. “Well, for what it’s worth…not much, I guess.” He seemed to want to continue, but instead he gestured vaguely to the tombstone.

"You look like her... It was…frightening, you know, when I first saw you, knowing who you were." Laguna’s eyes were silvery with old affliction, his head snapping down when he caught Squall’s hard gaze. He wove his fingers together. "She was beautiful, Squall. You would have loved her."

Squall’s mouth twitched. "Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it."

The August night held its breath, the heavy air thinning suddenly to a fragile globe of glass. Laguna Loire’s throat went dry. This talk was not going the way he had planned, and in fact, his estranged son wasn’t reacting the way he had expected. He didn’t seem to care at all. He had expected something, anything— just some sort of reaction. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t know what to say.

He wasn’t saying much of anything. He had observed his son’s deep silence, which was inexplicable. Neither Raine nor himself had been as reserved as the young SeeD soldier. Raine had been a no-nonsense woman, to be sure, but never so trenchant. The distance in his blue eyes inspired numbing guilt in him; they were Raine’s eyes, only colder. Strange how he seemed to be able to turn on the switch that made them so angry and frigid in only a few moments. He had seen his eyes softer before, when he was with the young Galbadian sorceress. A semblance of a smile had even drifted over his face. It was then he had looked most like his mother.

What an odd coincidence that his son had fallen for Julia’s daughter. He supposed it ran in the Loire veins. Of course, Squall had been given Raine’s maiden name in his absence, but nevertheless, he was a Loire all the same. Squall had a coolness about him that Laguna had never possessed, but he saw something of himself in him; a certain uneasiness with words, which was somehow reassuring. It seemed so perfectly ironic that only a Heartilly could melt his icy son; that Julia had never belonged to him because it was in the stars that their children would someday fall in love. So it seemed.

"I’m just…sorry. I don’t really know what else to say. I didn’t even know about you, or what had happened...until it was too late. If she just would have told me…” His eyebrows went up, all at once his brow pinching, his tone shrinking a bit before his head turned back to the stone. “I had already lost Elle…" Laguna’s voice was riddled with the ghosts of the lost past that no doubt visited him on this hill. The breeze lolled by, sweeping between them.

Somewhere in the suffocating violet of the evening, a dog barked. The abrupt sound echoed vaguely over the vacant hill before fading into the gentle and incessant voice of the dancing grass.

Squall Leonhart shifted uneasily. He wanted to go home. Back to the military academy that was the only place he ever really recalled thinking of as “home”. He wanted to see Rinoa, to hold onto her tightly so he wouldn’t sink down into the livid hatred that was engulfing his entire world so suddenly. He hadn’t planned on getting angry. It wasn’t in his nature to feel such scorching rancor, but it was thundering in him, wickedly aiming and pulling pressure onto the trigger. He understood well that his life’s outcome had been the product of a bad turn of fate. There was nothing that could have been done, and it didn’t matter now. It was over. It could never be changed. It could never be rectified. The damage was done and set in stone, and the Russian Roulette that had blown away his chances for a normal life was not worth blaming. There was nothing to blame except fate itself. And heaven. Heaven was to blame, it had taken away Raine Loire. Why?

Why?

He hadn’t planned on this involuntary and irrational anger.

He hadn’t planned on anything that had happened to him the last few weeks.

He hadn’t planned on falling in love either.

Of course, he doubted anyone ever intended to fall in love with anyone. Or, for that matter, to get so barbarically furious. He knew the only person he could drop the blame on was himself, and he had been doing that too long anyhow. The anger would not be sated on his own mistakes.

It only knew that the son that Laguna Loire was speaking to, the one he had abandoned was not listening. He wasn’t peering out of the boy’s steely eyes any longer. The son that Laguna had expected to find was already gone…he had drowned in the rain many years ago, and all that was left was the shell of him that was filled with a different man altogether.

"I’m not your son." Squall’s voice was desolate, a papery whisper that scratched through the humming silence.

Laguna stared, his watery eyes flashing in the new, virginal blackness.

The hollow, calm words were disquieting. Very serene and empty, like the eye of a hurricane. The ever intense flame in Squall’s eye had dwindled to dust, and his emotional camouflage wavered. His gaze had descended finally upon the memorial in the sudden mausoleum hush. It was such a small wedge of stone to commemorate someone’s life. It seemed unbalanced.

He would have liked, at least, to have met her. To have seen her, just once. But she was gone, and not even her own son remembered her. God’s cruelty.

Squall didn’t believe in God. Not anymore. If there was a God, he wasn’t paying any attention to what was happening in people's lives. They had to fend for themselves in that area. Rely on loved ones, maybe. Something like that.

He buckled his knees and knelt beside his mother’s grave. She was gone and mourning her would do no good. He didn’t even remember her.

Squall Leonhart stared vacantly through the feeble moonlight, mourning. Or trying to. Someone needed to. He needed to. No one should be forgotten, that must have be why people wasted their time in denial, mourning. It was as absurd, but then, so was everything else.

An empty cavern of bitter desire for revenge resealed with an echoing sigh inside his chest. It was filled, one of the hundred bulletholes in his crippled heart was filled with mourning, and a new, cold clarity. It was filled with a sharp acceptance and with love for a young, dark haired, dark eyed angel named Rinoa. That was what mattered now. He knew why, now, it had all happened.

Because.

Because life was that way. It was to be accepted, or begrudged, but never denied. Because his life was laid open to the benign indifference of the universe. There was no why. But the only thing that was worth wading through the preposterousness of life was creating an answer to that elusive why.

To have meaning. To find the one, wonderful thing he wanted.

The thing that made everything else worth it: just one person who honestly wanted him in their life. Just one wonderful, dark eyed girl who could understand his nonsense, but not labor to figure him out to the bone. He didn’t even have himself figured out that far down.

The high, subliminal whine of the cricket’s one note, summer violins shimmied through the heavy, dead air. Squall stood, his clothes rustling and his belts clinking musically together. He looked to Laguna, his father, who stood with a melancholy ghost of a smile twitching on his face. The man’s eyes flickered flatly, like tarnished mirrors in a lost attic. He wasn’t innocent in the matter, but no one was. He was guilty. But it didn’t matter now.

"Did you love her?"Squall’s voice was cautious, his face staring down at the granite block, for once, seeming to accept that he was mortal.

Laguna blinked, the tarnish in his eyes escaping and rolling down his cheek slowly, like a sticky pearl. He didn’t know if his son could tell.

"I never knew how much, until she was suddenly gone." His smoothed his hands down the front of his wrinkled dress shirt that glowed a dusky periwinkle in the dismal twilight haze. "Have you ever been in love before, Squall?"

The young man’s eyes went blank, their rare clarity vanishing. He had never considered such a question. It seemed that the emotion he recognized as love had never existed in him until recently, until Rinoa. The idea of it living dormant inside him was appalling. There had been nothing worth love in his life until someone had drawn it out. Rinoa, with her sweet, musical laughter. The way she said his name. The gentle expression her eyes assumed when she watched him, tilting her head like a curious bird. The angelic, innocent aura that drifted around her as she slept by his side, and was still there in the morning. She had taught him something…she had softened his stone hard resolve and elicited humanity from him. She was his savior. His perfect destiny, hanging in the wicked stars.

"Before now…"

The obscure smile returned, itching on Laguna’s lips. He watched Squall as he turned quickly and began to walk away, navigating through the deep grass toward the ornate mobile academy, Balamb Garden, which had landed the night before on the phantom laden plain above Tear’s Point. His voice was once again distant, cutting through the air as he spoke, never turning around.

"…I couldn’t."