Post

Chapter 1 - Letters that you never thought you'd send

By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )

Dear Squall

It somehow seemed like a very silly way to start her last letter, but then she had heard often enough growing up that she was a very silly person.

He got all sorts of letters now, some of them addressed 'Cmmdr.' (like they had some prejudice against vowels) and in such cramped, precise printing that she had once asked him if handwriting were an important part of the final SeeD examination, squeezed in between GFfing and marksmanship. Even Zell had a clear squarish hand than when viewed next to hers made her feel like a finishing school dropout. Selphie told her that her handwriting was cute, and for a while dotted all her 'I's with little hearts in imitation, until Quistis informed them both that the filing mechanism that sorted the Garden's analog documents could not read Selphie's new and 'improved' hand, and that had been the end of that. Really, her handwriting had been something of a curse her entire life, because it was difficult enough to get people to take her seriously in her cute little blue arm warmers and zippered shorts without Zone's prized possession being the Timber Owls manifesto blotted and worked over laboriously in her fair hand and headlined by the words 'the people demand that the president pay for his brutal tyranny' set off by the little flower squiggles on either side that she used as asteriks.

She had never had any problem taking herself seriously, so she really couldn't fathom why others couldn't. She was Wingheart, Heartilly, the Sorceress, Angel Wing: the Shooting Star Wishing Star, and when she was seventeen years old she had danced the Dollet Waltz with the cutest boy ever in the history of the world, and that had been the end of that, or the beginning maybe. The world needed wonder and hope and love and friendship and happiness, and it definitely needed her to stick her tongue out at Squall and pull faces when he was being too serious -- stars in the skies and stars in her eyes and she was Rinoa Heartilly, friendship ambassador of the Gardens.

Sometimes his letters came addressed to 'Assistant Headmaster Leonhart, Balamb Garden,' and he had his own office and everybody at the Garden who didn't wink at one another and call her his little wife often called her 'the secretary' when they teased her and she loved it forever and ever, learning to type and filing all his papers wrong, carbon paper smudges between her fingers. She was a good wife and maybe an even better secretary, and sometimes she sat on his knee to take dictation, but that was only ever after the office was closed and he had locked the door and wedged Lionheart against it, cutting a familiar gouge in the smooth, polished stone.

But she was getting sidetracked. She was getting side tracked and there wasn't much time left. There wasn't much time left for anything at all. She bent over her little planner again and began scratching at it with her ink pen, the Stop rippling off of her even though she didn't look up, and it kept them caught in time for a few more seconds.

I'm writing you this letter to tell you that it's too late --

It hadn't made sense when it happened, nothing had made sense for days, and now it was as if everything was being swallowed up, grabbed and gobbled fiercely around the edges until what was left didn't have clean seams any more. They had news of it at the Fisherman's Horizon, stopping in for routine maintenance on the Garden, the engineers hanging all over it like a swarm of ants, buffing out the dings, rewiring things first this way and that: always punching overtime for more efficiency. They were always begging the Garden to harbor for any time it could spare, for a little more time to reinvent and reunderstand, to reverse engineer the concise and elegant technology of the Centra. Cid spared them the Garden as often as possible, or rather Squall did, since the Assistant Headmaster and Commander had the final word on all things. She was pretty sure this went part and parcel with saving all of time that had been known and could be known. Maybe he was a lion. Maybe he was her lion.

This time it was Flare blossoming around her, and the heat danced haze on the roof, but she was careful not to singe the flowers.

Squall. Squall. The Commander had gone to Lunaside II, to ferry Ellone up to the colony for some sort of resonance study that Odine was engrossed in, and Irvine had graciously invited himself aboard the Ragnarok, always honored, he said, to play escort for their big sister. Rinoa he had left with the slight touch of a gloved hand on her bare flesh. It was only a few days, only ever a few days, and it was so silly because of course they'd been apart before for days or even longer and she knew -- would always know -- that no matter how far away he might go, he was always right there, beside her: in the weight of the steel and silver on her neck or around her finger, or the warm beat of the pulse in her heart.

Timber is gone, and probably the rest of Galbadia.

It had all started with Timber, just an offhand remark from the Grease Monkey, hip deep in the guts of the Garden: Timber's gone offline, and the capitol says they can't get any trains through. Some kind of obstruction in one of the tunnels. Nobody's heard a comeback from the forest for a good week now.

Timber had been her safe house, her runaway-home and secret base, her freedom fight; the first hive for a little queen. When she thought her insides would boil away with rage and resentment and she could no longer look at her father in the face, she had wrathfully thrown down her life and stamped upon it, a proper fit for a drama-loving debutante who was tired of watching the world from behind a bulletproof window. She had wrapped herself in rebellion and the flag of Timber's independence because it was also the flag of her own independence, a rebellion against the tyrannous rule of an overbearing (but well-meaning, she understood that now) father. She had learned to talk loudly when it was necessary, and to plant her hands firmly on her hips when she used phrases like 'guerrilla action' and 'the oppression of the proletariat.' She learned how to wheel and how to deal, and it was in the wheeling that she found herself dealt squarely into the hands of her impassive lover. She and Timber had been through much together: seen each other's grand triumphs and petty defeats, great romances and little girl hopes and dreams and wishes. They were cradle to perfume and she was Princess and it was Kingdom, and she and Timber were sisters in the womb.

This is bad business said the Master Fisherman, and early in the morning she had climbed to the highest rusty spire of the Horizon with him and they had watched something dark boiling at the line where the sea met the earth met the land.

When she ordered a special the independently minded citizens of the Horizon had argued and fussed until the Engineer explained it to them plainly: there was something a little fishy on the big continent and the Sorceress and SeeD's elite were going to go investigate it. Then every man, woman, and child had stopped their lives to converge on the track and put together a train from any parts they could lay hands on. She was a Sorceress, she was the Sorceress; she had shouldered down Ultimecia herself when they had thrown magic as thick as tar, the sparks and jolts tingling down her body as she rained feathers and Holy and Ultima and soul-stolen Apocalypse from the witch-sorceress, rained Meteor, the death from the sky, a thousand stones pulled out of their place in the firmament by her will, through her magic. She had stood before Ultimecia, and now Ultimecia stood no more.

Sometimes they called her Little Hyne. She ate too much cake at birthday parties and wore lace and ribbons on her slips and danced when other people didn't understand it, but she had shown them the strength of the angel wing against the raven feather, against the bull-horned, faceless, junctioned monster of the time witch. She was alive with the breath and force and blessing of true, pure magic, and it fell in her footsteps as she walked. Squall was Knight, but she was Sorceress. He was commander of his Garden, but she was guardian of the world.

So she ordered a special and they built her a train with Selphie as engineer and Zell as porter: one engine, no cars, built for speed and built for punishment out of corroded iron and acid-scored steel. They would go to Timber and find out why the city couldn't be raised, and they would be back to report when Squall touched down in the solar dish. Quistis saw them off from the station and then went back to oversee repairs on the Garden.

They hadn't known then. There was no way to know. They could not have known.

It's a mess down here.

Mess wasn't a strong enough word. It was meant to mean the way she'd often left her bedroom as a little girl, sometimes for spite after the governess had given her a spanking. Or maybe mess was too strong a word for then, before they'd understood it all, because at first everything had seemed all right. They'd come to an obstruction on the track, something like a massive, pulsing shadow, but Selphie hadn't worried too much, just piled on more coal until the engine was at full steam and then hung on the whistle, the scream of warning of the train coming breakneck down the tracks. She and Zell had hung onto anything they could lay hands on, bracing for impact, but there was only a sort of pillowing sensation, like running through gelatin or drop-kicking a bloobra, and then Angelo was splitting the sky howling like it was someone's death knell and there was the faint, milky glow of green outside the windows and a sound like a hundred wet, meaty tennis balls bouncing over the engine as it broke into daylight again.

Timber was still and silent, a hundred times more silent than it had ever been even in the worst days of the occupation. There were no people on the streets, no children, no dogs, no cats, and Angelo stayed close at her heels, tail between his legs, because something was not right here and he was afraid. She was afraid too, although she couldn't say why. She kept her hand on Angelo's head because that was warm and fur and heat under her hands and it did a little to drive off the chill in her heart.

The Timber Hotel was empty, although the little model trains ran like nothing was out of the ordinary, the tiny lights on the switches blinking on and off, happy and monotonous. Dinner was on the table at the house of the Forest Fox matron, cold and uneaten. The food had clearly been out for days, but strangely there were no flies. Zell scratched the back of his head with the studded knuckles of his glove and said aloud what they were all feeling.

"This place is creepy weird, man. I dunno what I expected when we got here, but I didn't expect this creepy weird crap."

She was afraid. She wanted to grab their hands and drag them back to the train and run away back to Fisherman's Horizon full speed. She wanted Squall because Squall would take care of things. Squall would fix everything. That's what Squall did.

But they couldn't just sit around waiting for him, like they were all still little children. She was the Sorceress, and although she depended on them for their strength, they depended on her as their hope and faith. She took them into the Timber Maniacs building and hoped they would find some record of where all the people of Timber had gone. Zell drank a liter of water from the cooler and Selphie connected to the world network as Rinoa dug for any sign of what might've become of the people of Timber.

After what might have been a very long time or only a few minutes, Selphie found her under the desk of the receptionist, searching the floor for scraps.

Galbadia wouldn't comeback, and the Horizon reported that Dollet couldn't be raised either. It was as if all of the western continent were under blackout. Trabia cameback and reported that the last live link with Balamb Town had been that morning. That had brought Zell to his feet.

"That's it. We gotta pull the switches and get this train on the track for Balamb. If something's happened to Ma -- "

There was a savage growl from the archives, all the more bone-chilling and gut-cutting because Rinoa had known it, and they had burst into the stacks to find Angelo on his side, feebly twitching, while a strange dumpy little black thing perched on him, staring up suddenly with lantern eyes before he split Angelo's chest open, bone and all coming apart like wet paper. Angelo's heart was still beating, and he wagged his tail once, his dark eyes limpid because he had failed to protect his best girl. And then the heart was gone as if it had never been there, and he was stiff and cold and dead.

She had screamed. And then she had screamed and screamed because after he was cold for a minute something happened to Angelo and he wasn't Angelo any more: just ink that pitched and moved and opened two lantern eyes, and as the eyes blinked open over the train city, oil pitching up from the cobbled ground into stumpy little bodies she suddenly knew where all the people of Timber had gone. Zell had grabbed her by the arm and hauled her out and they'd gone into the streets where open fighting gave them some advantage.

But the things were thick as gnats in the city, pitching up in droves and piles of soupy, inky flesh. Zell plowed and punched and roundhoused through them, a storm of arms and legs and anger and fear that tasted like sweat in the air, slinging them into walls where they exploded into nothing, like balloons filled with helium, and there was Strange Vision striking like a scorpion tail as Selphie felt after Quetzacotl and the air lit up with electricity, the static making her hair stand out from her head.

But there were too many, there were far too many, and they all kept falling backwards together in a closer and closer triangle until it became clear that Timber could not be won.

"Fall back," she had hollered, and they had fallen back, up the stairs and out of the city and into the newgrowth forests that were now creeping up around Timber. Selphie staggered against a tree and was sick into a bush, coughing and hacking and spitting until she could do nothing but dry heave.

"Galbadia," she sobbed, "Dollet won't comeback either. Balamb. Trabia answered. Trabia."

"Ma," howled Zell, and squatted on the ground holding his head in despair, "The goddamned hell are those things?"

Rinoa was very quiet.

"They ate Angelo's heart. Then he -- Heartless," she said softly, almost to herself, "They seek what they lack. Heartless. They've come to eat our hearts."

Zell swore, but Selphie had collected herself.

"We've got to get away from the cities. That's where they all are, for sure. If they have to eat hearts then the cities will be overrun."

"Fucking hell, Selphie," Zell spat, and let a backwards kick level a tree, "We can't just leave those people. I mean, that's my Ma. We've gotta go back to Balamb. What if there are people we can save? What if there are people who don't know yet? You don't know that everywhere is as bad as Timber. We can't just fucking abandon the world to save our own skins."

Selphie drew herself up to her full and terrifying height of five feet and put her finger right under Zell's nose.

"Squall isn't here right now, Zell. That means that we have to protect Rinoa. You think I'm not worried about everything? About Balamb and my Trabia and everything? But I'm a SeeD, Zell. You're a SeeD. That means we do our duty even when it's really, really hard. I'm afraid and I want to go home. I want to go back to the Garden. I want to make sure everyone is all right, but right now all I can do for sure is keep Rinoa safe. She's our Sorceress, Zell, remember? She's our good Sorceress."

Zell turned his back on them and didn't say anything else, so Selphie shifted from one foot to the other and then turned her full attention to Rinoa.

"So where are we going, Rinoa? Maybe if we travel fast along the tracks we could make it back to the Horizon and then get to Esthar and we could send a signal that Squall could catch -- "

Rinoa closed her eyes so hard that her head ached and she gritted her teeth before answering. Angelo. "We can't get back to Fisherman's Horizon that way. We're going to have to assume that there are things in the tunnels and on the tracks. It's too big of a chance to take. That means we're cut off by rail." She had been a rebel leader, worn her fatigues and paid her dues even when they'd called her 'Princess.' "We'll go south and hope that they haven't gotten to Winhill." She turned to look into the thin new woods of Timber and then shook her head so that her hair flurried furiously around her face. "And Zell is right. We have a responsibility to warn as many people as we can."

Zell's head jerked up at this and Selphie danced in dismay, "Rinoa, you aren't serious. We can't put you in danger. You're too important -- "

"The satellite uplink is still active in Dollet," she explained. "We'll broadcast globally from the television station. If we can buy just a few minutes to send out a message -- "

"Then we can warn the whole world at once!" Selphie cheered, throwing both fists into the air because doing something was much better than doing nothing.

They went to the television station.

We tried to warn everyone about them.

It had been hard infighting through the twisted and confused back alleys of Timber, down through the pub, where Zone had often whiled away his free hours playing darts with the bartender over old copies of naughty magazines, and then into the cramped atriums made by too many buildings butting up against one another in too small a space. The alleys were still filled with junk, a sign that the rebel groups turned restoration committees had yet to venture back this far to cover the rusting metal in crisp black epoxy and plant their Esthar tulips. All the debris made it hard to judge for danger areas, because in this mess every corner and catch was a danger area, blind spots where dark, round, bumping, creeping, lamp-eyed monsters would stumble out of whenever their prey got close enough so they could be scented by their heat and warmth and life.

How so many of the smooth, mouthless devourers could fit into the cramped alleys that led to the abandoned television station Rinoa could not understand as she fell into the blue-white grace of Holy again and again, clearing a swath for them as Strange Vision struck out like a lash and Zell thrashed and mashed and piledrove and suplexed, but then Selphie was shouting it and then it was so obvious it made her belly curl in on itself in a long-lost little girl fear of the dark.

"They're in the walls. They're in the ground. They're coming out of the shadows."

On the spidery ironwork stairs they got clear of the teeming mass for a few moments, and Rinoa hung over the railing, sighting as many of feebly hopping insectoid swarm as she could at once and then calling Meteor down, planet-stones whizzing past them from the sky and turning the ground below into a molten inferno of junk, milky green marbles, and unblinking lamp eyes. Zell kicked in the door to the studio and Selphie dragged her away because her mind was still lost in the plunge and entry tragectory of a dozen meteroites bound for Timber.

Timber still had power. The studio still had power, it was only the living that the Heartless cared to devour. It was only the warm, steaming flesh of a beating heart. Zell barricaded the door and then unbarricaded it when Selphie pointed out that it wouldn't really do much of anything to keep the Heartless out, it would just make it harder to get away after they had sent their message. Selphie ran around the sound room connecting wires into things and unglugging wires out of certain other things, punching buttons with no anticipation of what they might do, and generally banging on every console she came into contact with. Rinoa had heard Quistis say Hyne looks out for idiots in reference to Selphie's unique brand of techinical expertise, and maybe it was true or maybe Selphie really was an engineering genius, because within two minutes they were live and on the air, satellite uplink connecting them to every functioning reciever on the planet. Rinoa took a deep breath and then started.

"This is the Sorceress, Rinoa Heartilly, broadcasting live from Timber. This is not a test. This is a global emergency. For no reason should any manned vehicle approach the Western Continent. We are under attack by an invading swarm of monsters. Timber reports," her voice faltered slightly, but she steadied it, "no survivors. Galbadia, Dollet, and Balamb are under blackout, and assumed lost. If you are in those cities and listening to me now, you need to gather together only what you need to survive and get out of town. Get as far away from civilization as you can and try to approach beacheads for pickup. By no means should you approach the Heartless. Despite appearances, they are dangerous and seem to only attack in groups. SeeD special forces of Balamb Garden please mobilize and prepare to recieve the evacuees, but on no account are you to bring the Garden on shore. Please await further instructions from the Commander when he returns. The rails are impassable, so our SeeD unit will be retreating to Winhill where we hope to find survi -- "

"We've lost signal!" Selphie was yelling and then Zell leaned out from the door and swore and then fell into a senseless mantra, soft and almost crying to himself.

"Hooooooooooly She-yit. It's gone it's gone it's gone it's gone it's gone."

That's when we thought there still might be people left to warn.

Selphie yelped, and the whole studio listed a little to the side, like it was not a steel and iron tower on sturdy, grounded legs, but floater on fishing line, sick and tilting on the restless sea. Rinoa staggered from behind the velvet draped podium and managed to knit her fingers into the doorframe as the whole building listed again and she was thrown out onto the fire escape and her heart stopped beating.

It was like looking up, only it was looking down. It was a falling vertigo she'd only felt in the worst twists of time compression when her breath had come in backwards and her cells had fleshed back together instead of splitting and there were stars on the pavement, only there wasn't any pavement. There wasn't any junk cluttering up the dirty back alleys of Timber because there weren't any dirty back alleys. A few feet below her the iron of the fire escape just sheered off, as if it had been wrenched away by a giant, grabbing hand, and there was nothing under them but swirling dark violet sky.

There was no pub. There were no tiered rail stations. Half of Timber was gone and there wasn't even a crater to mark where it had been. There was only thick, groping, tangible nothing.

"Well," said Selphie unhelpfully, "We sure aren't taking the train back."

Then the whole building began to shake because the ground was boiling under them, and Selphie threw one grip of her nunchaku over the heavy, rubber insulated cord that carried power from lower Timber to the elevated television station and made an emergency exit.

"Come on, Rinoa," she bellowed over all the smoke and disaster and sound, "Hold around my middle and hold on tight unless you've got your wingies ready. We gotta take the express elevator down in a hurry."

Selphie climbed up onto the railing and Rinoa threw her arms around the sparrow thin waist with its jaunty hip bones biting up through the comfortable fabric, burying her face in the small of Selphie's back and the faintly floral scent of crushed yellow courdoroy. Then she turned back suddenly and looked up for a moment at the other SeeD, who was bouncing from foot to foot like a belhemel was in his pants.

"What about Zell?" she yelled back, mostly into the yellow courdoroy. She was a Sorceress, but they were her SeeD, under lifelong contract even after the liberation of Timber, or so Selphie claimed, and they were also her friends and her family. She wasn't a SeeD, couldn't think like a SeeD even when she tried her hardest, so she tried her best to do as she was told in hard situations, but sometimes she felt that it was purely because she couldn't think like a SeeD and didn't think like a soldier that they'd managed to get through so many scrapes alive, from the future to the past and back again. Sometimes they really all needed someone to convince them not to dutifully chomp down on their suicide pills, and she wasn't leaving the Balamb Town basketball champion behind, no way, no how.

Apparently he wasn't keen on being left behind either, because he cupped both of his hands around his mouth so that the sound would carry and then shouted, "Get goin' girls. I'm gonna come down hand over hand as soon as you get clear," and then he gave them a unappologetic shove that sent them racing down the line under Nuclear Zell Power.

The screaming ride was fast and furious and Rinoa realized that Selphie couldn't do much in the way of steering with her hanging around her waist, so they ended up crashing violently into the open kiosk of the pet shop, sending magazines and gyshal greens everywhere.

For a moment it was pure confusion of failing limbs and skinny bodies scrabbling all over one another and Selphie's foot in her very stylish suede boot was crammed underneath her chin, but then they were both tumbling out of the mess of the crashed kiosk and onto the sooty pavement of the Timber that was left. Selphie staggered to her feet and looked up at the television station and then swore very softly to herself.

It was gone.

Rinoa vaguely felt herself being dragged out of the city for a second time, but all she could do was look back hypnotized into the swirling violet dark gulf that had been Timber.

We lost Zell in Timber. He was just gone. He could be dead or alive. I can't say. I don't know. I'm sorry, Squall.

In the scrub fields outside of Timber, Rinoa tugged on Selphie's arm to dazedly reveal what she'd put her hand on in the mess and confusion of the pet shop: a chocobo whistle. On any other day the chance to call and ride a chcobo would have made Selphie wiggle violently, but Selphie had put her little girl away. She was all SeeD, from her tulip flip haircut to the soles of her fashionable boots, all grim and spit and beaten metal. She called their chocobo who appeared wild eyed and nervous after some minutes of waiting, and then she helped Rinoa onto it before she scrambled onto it herself, white knuckled grip on the worn leather traces that she'd pulled out of some pocket or another. Always prepared: SeeD Scout Selphie with transportation merit badge.

They were bound for Winhill, running the ground out from under themselves while there was still ground left to run.

The ride was long and cold, and it started to rain before they were half an hour gone, but the bipedal jolting and bump of the chocobo running full tilt was strangely lulling, like an enormous clockwork heart, beating out the time and shaking her back into herself.

They stayed away from the railroad tracks except when they absolutely had to be crossed: once south of Timber they stood like old iron scars against the badlands earth near the cliffs that rose like stale cake against the dark slate and storm of the sky. They got wet. They both got wet, soaked to the bone from hours riding with no protection from the rain, and one or both of them were off of the chocobo more than on, pushing or dragging him up Shenand hill, and for the first time Rinoa wished she favored vinyl over knits as her clothes began to hang heavy on her, like she'd wrapped herself in a sponge. Down the other side of the hill and into the bluffs, Selphie's hair plastered to her head and her own hair wrung wet and being swept with a stinging consistency into her face.

PRANK'D. The end. There will probably never be more of this XD. I have posted this sporadically other places, but never here SO. Here it is for posterity. If for some reason people desperately want to know what happens, please express your interest and I will try to finish it when I have time. Otherwise I am the only person in the universe who gives a crap about Post XD I started this ages ago.