Summary: (OneShot) We all knew Squall was cold. After all, mercenaries kill for the highest bidder.
Notes: Squall just fascinates me for some reason. Rather unrealistic scenario, but it just wouldn't leave me alone. The title came from Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, because halfway through writing this I was reminded of it. There's about one line mentioning Squall/someone, and though the other person is never named :cough: Seifer :cough: I'm sure you can guess.

A Death Foretold

By Hades' Phoenix

The cadets all stared in shock and horror.

Straightening to his full height, Squall Leonhart casually wiped the blood from LionHeart's blade against the black leather of his pants and sheathed the gunblade at his side. Eyes that now seemed more grey than blue gazed impassively at the body sprawled inelegantly at his feet, and at the red warmth slowly spreading across the floor tiles.

"Squall, what the hell just happened?"

The still stunned crowd parted silently before the furious strides of Instructor Trepe, whose clacking heels produced the loudest sound in the cafeteria. Her stern blue eyes were dark with ire, lips thinned into a straight line, hand hovering noticeably over the whip coiled at her hip.

The Commander just gave her a long look from the edge of his gaze.

"Please, ma'am," one the cadets, a normally bold and irascible boy who now seemed as timid as a wounded child, said pleadingly. "Smith just…he challenged the Commander, and he…he tried to take it too far…"

Trepe's eyes narrowed at Leonhart. "Is that true?"

A barely perceptible shrug.

"Details, Squall."

"It was a challenge. When I refused, he believed it cowardice and attacked."

Trepe knew that further interrogation would have to wait. No matter the circumstances (Squall just killed a student oh Hyne now what) it would be a breach of etiquette to question the Commander before a crowd of student SeeDs.

And his voice was so cold one could hear every flat word strike the floor and shatter.

When a terrified student had come running into her office babbling incoherently, Trepe had instantly dropped the reports she had been finishing for the other Gardens and forced the student to shut the fuck up and take her to the source.

SeeDs must respond without hesitation and without fear.

Expecting to find several students perhaps engaged in an illegal duel, she had instead found Leonhart standing over the corpse of one of her students.

Dober Smith—a young man with average abilities, with potential as a competent SeeD but no real talent to mark him as someone of elite capabilities. His skills with a sword were rather advanced, but such skill was tempered by his impulsive recklessness and misplaced sense of pride.

Trepe would later get the full story from witnesses; Smith had approached the Commander in the cafeteria and challenged him to a duel, to which Leonhart had simply given him a stony glance and turned away. Most would have left the encounter at that, but, humiliated by the snub from the Commander before so many of his peers, he had foolishly drawn his sword and attempted to take the Commander by surprise.

Squall Leonhart was the man that had defeated a time-traveling Sorceress and her Knight; the man who, at a mere seventeen years of age, had become the highest-ranking SeeD in the largest Garden; the man called the Lion of Balamb and, perhaps more appropriately, Shiva's Lover.

But pride will blind, and Smith forgot all of this in the face of his rejection.

Before Smith had gotten his sword halfway up LionHeart was already turning and catching the opposing blade, twisting it sharply from the cadet's hands. The sword had flown, but Smith had pulled his knife and slashed outwards.

Even the man's close friends admitted that with Smith's irrationality, it was most likely a blow aimed to incapacitate.

LionHeart only had to finish its forward swing and it bit deeply into the man's side, collapsing a lung and killing Smith almost instantly. The cadet had fallen with a startling silence at the Commander's feet in a still, lifeless heap.

And never had the Commander's expression changed from its neutral porcelain mask.

Only the strong survive in this world.

Now, Trepe stared at Leonhart, until the stunned quiet was broken by the harsh cry of a young woman who dashed forward and dropped to her knees at the fallen cadet, running her hands frantically over the body in helplessness until they were stained red.

"You son of a bitch," she snarled at the Commander, and Trepe was distantly grateful that the woman seemed too distraught to reach for her own weapon, a slender rapier at her side. Trepe noted the woman's face in her mind to remind herself later, when reviewing exam results, that the cadet had allowed her emotions to overrule what should have been a mercenary's instincts. "Why the fuck did you have to kill him?"

The Commander's eyes were so dead that even the Instructor felt chilled.

"What is SeeD?"

"What?"

"Don't make me repeat myself."

"We're mercenaries for fuck's sake, what the hell does that have to do—"

"What do mercenaries do?"

The woman glared at him with passionate fury, but the Commander was unmoved. And though he spoke quietly it seemed that his voice sounded in every part of the room.

"We are paid to kill. Morals are determined by the highest bidders. This man's arrogance induced a flawed decision that caused his death."

Sometimes Trepe wondered if Guardian Forces could alter memories. Had the boy she remembered from the orphanage, in that silly yellow shirt Ellone had given him with those too-serious eyes, always been so cruel? So ruthless?

The Commander looked down at the girl without emotion, without pity or remorse or compassion. No doubt his very skin would be as cold as the stark leather he wore or the silver pendant of the vicious Griever, perhaps as cold as Shiva's flesh. He looked bleached of color in his blacks and whites and greys save for the streaks of splattered crimson on his leathers and the storm of his gaze, hollow as it was—as though he himself were the corpse lying so still on the unforgiving floor. A dead marble statue utterly untouchable in its perfection and mercilessness.

"Quistis, send a request to the family to pick up the body for funerary disposal. I will alert Doctor Kadowaki of the circumstances."

She bowed slightly in understanding.

New fear of the Commander had been awakened in the cadets and they backed away to allow him passage as he strode with feline grace towards the doors, as casual as though he had done nothing more exciting in his lunch hour than take a meal in the cafeteria.

"That's it?" the woman yelled, still crouched by the body of who Trepe assumed had once been her boyfriend. "What fucking kind of monster are you, you motherless bastard? You'd kill your own lover, wouldn't you?"

To Trepe's surprise the Commander paused, still some steps from the door. He turned his head slightly so that his profile could be seen over his shoulder.

"I already have."

Then he left, leaving a deep chill hanging in the air.