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FFVIII: Origins (5)
Pairing: Irvine/Selphie
Warnings: Angst
Chapter: Five
Rating: PG13
Summary: Zell finds out why he really didn't want to do this.
“Shit, I’m nervous.”
Selphie pats Zell’s arm, looking amused, though not outright laughing – because ridiculous as he’s acting, Zell is completely serious, his normal smiling expression more of a frown today, pulling his tattoo into an unfamiliar formation. “It’ll be alright, Zell. It can’t be that bad – it’s your dad. And you’ll have your adoptive mother anyway, even if this comes out all pear shaped, and she won’t hold a grudge. I bet she already understands why you have to do this.”
“I hope so,” Zell says, sighing heavily. He puts his head in his hands. “
“We’ve got few hours to go, actually, so I’d say pretty far.”
“Fuck.”
“Zell, this doesn’t really matter all that much anyway. Everyone who matters, you already know. Matron and Ma Dincht. You have a family even if your real one turns out to have disowned you or whatever.”
Zell looks up at Selphie and gives her a grateful smile, running his fingers through his hair and messing it all up hopelessly. “I wish I could be as confident about all this as you are. You seem to have it all figured out, me… I always just… Well, I’m not ready for this, anyway. I have no idea what I’m going to say now, how am I going to figure out to say when I’m with the guy?”
“I hope so.”
Selphie pats him on the shoulder again, smiling encouragingly. “I’m confident enough for both of us, anyway. All of us. It’ll be fine. Just remember he’ll probably be as awkward as you. Don’t expect too much. But I bet he’ll be so proud of you. I mean, you saved the world.”
“Helped save the world.”
“Making yourself sound more important than you were is a wonderful skill. It works every time on girls.”
Selphie eyes
“I don’t mean you,”
Selphie can’t help but smile and Zell huffs softly, rolling his eyes. He settles back to look out of the window, ignoring all their sap as much as possible, until the sound of their voices is nothing but a mildly annoying backdrop. He manages to zone out like that for a while, before he thinks of where exactly they’re headed, what exactly he’s planning on doing there.
“Shit.”
Zell rolls his eyes. “The power of negative thinking?”
“What if I think it’s going to go really well?”
“Then you might be disappointed.”
Zell thinks that over for a moment and then snorts softly. “So the power of positive thinking doesn’t apply?”
“I think positive thinking helps. Just be careful of expecting too much or worrying that it’ll be useless, okay? If you go into it all emotional and worried about it, something is bound to happen and it’s more likely to be a bad thing. This guy hasn’t seen you since you were a tiny baby, he doesn’t know you; he might not even acknowledge you’re his son.”
“You’re optimistic.”
“Realistic.”
Zell sighs softly and shifts around restlessly. “It’s alright for you, you’re so laid back you’re practically asleep half the time. I’ve never known you to get stressed out over something like I do.”
“Then you don’t know me that well,”
There’s a long silence after that. Selphie looks out of the window, watching the scenery with a kind of delight on her face akin to the look she gets when she’s on trains. Zell watches her for a while with some amusement, but when they get to an area that’s mostly grassland, she turns back and settles in her seat properly with a soft huff. “This is boring.”
“Nerve wracking.”
“I’m tired, my neck is aching and I hate driving on grass. But,”
Selphie looks out of the window again and rolls her eyes. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘g’.”
“Grass.”
“Nope.”
There’s silence again for a while. Zell shifts uncomfortably and finally settles down as if to sleep, but he’s nowhere near calm enough for that. At some point between eating breakfast and setting off, someone transformed his guts into a mess of snakes or something, because now they’re twisting round each other in a most distracting way.
He’s pretty sure that if he fell asleep, he’d dream of something ridiculous or something. It happened the night before his SeeD exam, he remembers. He’d gone to sleep a mess of nerves and woken up not sure whether to laugh, cry or get himself psycho-analysed. He shifts slightly.
“Sel? What’s the weirdest dream you’ve ever had?”
“Me? Umm… I never really remember my dreams.” She frowns, bringing her knees up to her chest and hugging them. “Irvy?”
“Ummm… are you sure you want to know?”
Zell snorts softly. “Asking that just makes me more curious.”
Selphie laughs. “Just tell me. As long as it’s not like, I don’t know, you having sex with something really weird.”
Zell snorts softly, shaking his head. “I’m even more curious now. I’m not going to tell until you do. If Selphie really doesn’t want to hear, she can… I don’t know, block her ears. I want to know, even if it’s really weird. Because mine is really, really weird. I never have fun dreams about sex.”
“My dream wasn’t really fun,”
Selphie rolls her eyes. “Come on. Just tell us now you’ve got us both so curious!”
“Well… I was having sex with this girl. Really cute girl. This was back before I met you, anyway, Selphie. She was on, I don’t know, the library committee or something? She was kind of geeky but cute. Anyway, I had this dream and I was having sex with her and boom, all of a sudden…”
“You woke up?”
Zell rolls her eyes. “Get to the point. What happened?”
“She kinda turned into an octopus. I don’t know, something with tentacles, anyway. And suckers. And she was sort of purple. And the really weird thing was, in the dream, I didn’t really think it was weird. She was just sort of clinging to me and… ugh.”
“For all of ten minutes, no doubt,” Zell mutters
Zell grins at him a little. “Anyway, I don’t think your dream is weirder than mine, really. It sounds like you were dreaming about the average sort of library girl, at least when you’re late with returning a book.”
“Zell!” Selphie huffs softly. “You dated a girl from the library!”
Zell rolls his eyes at Selphie, looking exasperated, half joking, half resenting the reminder about that particular incident. Which was more of a flat-out fiasco than an incident. Or perhaps more of a flat-out flop, because it hadn’t really gone anywhere. At all. At any point. “She was a
Selphie gives him a withering look for as long as she can manage, and then falls back on her usual smile, getting more comfortable. “So, what about this weird dream of yours? Tell us about it, now
“Well… I was really nervous. I always have weird dreams when I was nervous – and they can be, you know, nightmares, or just really freaky ones so I wake up and wonder what the fuck is wrong with me. Anyway, it was the night before the field exam, and they don’t tell you in so many words what’s going to happen, but the rumour gets around somehow. So I was having trouble sleeping, wondering what exactly we’d have to do, and…”
“Get to the point,”
Zell rolls his eyes. “Right, right. At first it was okay, it was like I’d woken up and it was the day of the SeeD exam. But at the point where everyone usually goes to the Fire Cavern to persuade Ifrit to give them his power, instead Quistis took me – and Seifer and Squall – to this shop and made us pick these weird outfits.”
Selphie snorts softly. “Weird outfits? Like what?”
“Like… dresses.”
She puts a hand over her mouth, now, to avoid laughing too much at the expression on Zell’s face – but can’t help letting a giggle escape when she spots Irvine’s expression, studiously serious, him nodding along and making encouraging noises, looking almost like a psychiatrist listening to a difficult case.
Zell glares at them both a little. “I tell you, it was really freaky. They were… all frilly and shit. And feathers. Feathers at the back. And then Quistis told us that we’d have to wear them, on stage, and dance in them. These girly dresses. So, uh, I said no way but Seifer and Squall didn’t seem to care. And Seifer called me a wuss. So Quistis dragged me along and made me put on this dress thing –”
“Kinky,”
“And then I woke up and thought what the fuck and I wondered if maybe I needed to see Kadowaki and get myself declared mentally unstable.”
“Your case is a difficult one,”
Zell kicks the back of
“At least that distracted you from thinking about your father, huh?” Selphie says, brightly.
Zell groans.
---
He takes a deep breath before he knocks on the door. If he looks back, the car is waiting there; Selphie, clenching her fists with hope and excitement and encouragement, all on his behalf, and Irvine, leaning back in his seat and stretching his long legs out, watching him with that lazy smile of his that turns anyone’s legs to jelly, regardless of gender and sexual orientation.
That’s pretty much all the encouragement he needs to knock on the door. Besides the thought of Seifer calling him a wuss if they get back to the others without him actually having spoken to his father after this insanely long journey to get here. He knocks as hard as he can and then winces, thinking that it might be considered rude.
He has to wait quite a long time for someone to come to the door. He’s about to knock again – or give up – when he hears heavy footsteps beyond the door and drops his hand, frozen in place with nerves. The darn snakes in his guts still aren’t letting up.
“Hello?” the man grunts. “Who’re you and what d’you want?”
“Hi, uh. I’m… well, how long have you lived here? I mean, if you’ve been here for a long time, I think I’m your son. I was adopted. Uh. Sent to Edea Kramer’s Orphanage when I was very young. But if you’ve just moved here in the last few years, then I guess I’m nothing to do with you, really. My name is Zell. Zell Dincht.”
On a whim, he put his hand out to the guy, hoping he’d shake it, something to break the all too apparent ice between them. He can almost hear Selphie breathlessly cheering him on.
“I did have a son,” the man says, slowly. “Scrawny little thing. Cried a lot. I didn’t really care for him; his mother dumped him with me, the little bitch. Said she couldn’t take care of him and that I was the father, I should look after him. I sent him to some relations for a while, but they must’ve got sick of his crying, too, because he ended up in an orphanage. His name might’ve been Zell. I don’t know. Never had much time for the brat.”
Zell takes a deep breath, somewhat disconcerted by the man’s attitude. He wonders whether he really can be this man’s son. He wonders what his mother – his possible mother – must’ve thought, dumping him with this guy. He wonders whether she loved him at all, whether she honestly thought she was doing the best thing for him by giving him to this guy. Or whether she just wanted to be rid of him, whether she just wanted to get some kind of small revenge on an ex-lover.
He takes another deep breath. “Well, uh, I’ve been looking for my parents. My real parents, obviously. And Matron – the woman who looked after me when I was in the Orphanage, you know – found this address in her records about where I came from. So. Uh…”
The guy doesn’t look like him at all, he thinks. His eyes, maybe, the same kind of colour, the hair the same kind of blond. But he’s all gone to fat, if there was much muscle there to begin with, and his expression is unfriendly. Zell gets the feeling he doesn’t smile at much and if he does, it’s at someone else’s discomfort.
Still.
“I was hoping to talk to you a bit, anyway. Assuming you are my father.”
“I’ve lived in this house all my life,” the man says, grudgingly. “So I guess you must be my son. I always thought a son of mine would look less… like a pansy. You look as if you couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.”
Zell’s eyes narrow a little. He wants to defend himself. He wants to say, I’m a SeeD, a class A SeeD. One of the best. I fought against the sorceress in the last war. I’m the reason you get to sit around and complain about your life, instead of spend your life as a slave to Ultimecia, beaten all the time, whimpering and whining and doing your best, every day, so you don’t get killed.
He looks back at the car, waiting for him.
The man snorts. “You don’t look it. Still, you wanted to talk to me? Come on in, if you must.”
Zell steps into the house, trying not to look around. He has a feeling he’ll be depressed by all the squalor of it. He has a feeling this whole visit will be depressing, but he wanted it. He wanted it so badly. He wanted to know where he came from, and here he is, and he doesn’t like the answer. Edea knew, he thinks. Edea didn’t want him to know, but she let him go anyway. Just as his adoptive mother – he can’t help but think of her as his real mother – let him go. He decides that the very first thing he’s going to do when they get back to Balamb is go and hug his Ma. And apologise.
“What’s your name?” he asks, reluctantly, realising that the man hasn’t told him. His own father. It seems – unreal. He’s almost glad for that. He can pretend that soon he’ll wake up in the back of the car and it’ll be alright and they won’t be there yet. He knows he isn’t dreaming, though. He already tried pinching himself and it hurt a lot.
“Jack.”
The door shuts behind him and Zell tries not to feel too trapped. The man – Jack, his father – walks along behind him into another room, grudgingly offering him a drink. He declines, and finds a chair to sit in, trying not to move anything.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?”
Zell feels almost like he’s being mocked, from the tone in his father’s voice. He thought – well, he thought it’d be better than this, anyway. Somehow. He realises now that he never really thought he’d be welcomed with open arms, but he still expected something. Some real spark of interest, some real reaction, rather than this incurious, unemotional meeting.
“I wanted to know what my father and mother were like,” he says, quietly. “Can you tell me about my mother?”
“Her name was Yu. Stupid name, stupid girl. You don’t look like either of us. She was small. Dark hair. Pretty enough, but she was a stupid little bitch.”
Zell bites his lip. He tries to imagine her. Small and pretty? Dark hair? Pale skin? He can’t imagine it. He thinks mother and he thinks of Ma Dincht and Matron, and realises that that’ll always be the case. “Why did she leave me with you?”
“She was broke.”
“She couldn’t look after me?”
The man shrugs. Zell hates him more every minute he spends with him, hates that he can’t describe his mother accurately, that he never really cared about her. He hates that he came from this, and hopes he didn’t. He tries to think of all the things he’s ever thought of saying to his father.
He finds himself staring down at the carpet, memorising the pattern, until he’s sure he’ll never forget it. Jack asks him no questions, and turns the television on in a moment without even asking if it’s alright. Zell stays as long as he can stand to, trying to find some shred of likeness between himself and this man.
---
Selphie sighs softly, stretching out across the back seat. “How do you think it’s going? I mean, when they went inside, that was sort of hopeful, but at the same time I didn’t much like the look of the guy. I wouldn’t’ve blamed him for just coming back to the car and calling it quits.”
“Me neither,”
“And if he does, we should get together a rescue party?”
Selphie nods slightly and then sits up properly, a hint of excitement in her voice again, replaced almost immediately by a kind of sadness. “Here he comes. He doesn’t look too happy. Kind of sick, even. Do you think I should go and kick the big guy’s ass?”
“I think we should probably just get out of here as quickly as possible,”
Zell opens the door and slides into the car, banging the door shut behind him. His fists are clenched. Selphie moves closer to him, slipping an arm around him and feeling how tense he is. “What happened?”
“His name was Jack. My mother’s name was Yu.”
“And?”
Zell sighs softly, resting his head back against the seat. Selphie hugs him a little tighter, bubbling over with sympathy, but at the same time reluctant to say much, wanting him to say what he can about it right now and get it out a little. She nudges him gently.
“Better out than in, remember?”
He huffs softly and runs his fingers through his hair, rescuing a rather dejected looking spike from collapsing altogether. He looks a little more like Zell then, trying to smile at them both. “Can we get going first?”
“Sure,”
Selphie prods Zell gently. “So what happened?”
“Well… I said that I’m his son and he sort of said that he guesses that must be so. He sent me to some relatives of his, apparently, once he got sick of my crying when I was really little. But they couldn’t stand me either. Or maybe they couldn’t afford me, I don’t know. If they’re anything like him, it’s because they couldn’t be bothered with me. I don’t really want to find out. Matron and my ma were right. I didn’t really want to know all that much.”
Selphie hugs him again and then pulls away, giving him some space. She bites her lip. “What about your mother?”
“Small, dark haired, pretty. That’s all he could tell me. He said she was stupid, but I don’t think he could find his backside with both hands himself, even if he tried for a day or two.”
“She left me with him,” Zell says, quietly. “She must have been sick of me, too. Or. No, he said… he said that she was broke. I don’t think they ever cared about each other at all. Maybe she just left me with him because it was an easy way to get rid of me. She must’ve known he wouldn’t really want anything to do with me.”
“Maybe he was nicer when he was younger?” Selphie offers. “Maybe… I don’t know. Oh, Zell. I’m sorry.”
Zell shrugs slightly. “It’s not your fault.”
There’s a long pause. Zell shifts uncomfortably, and Selphie tries to settle down, hoping that the same thing won’t happen to the others who have somewhere to go to try and find their families. She’d hate that. She wants someone – one of them, at least – to have a happy ending, like Squall had with Sir Laguna.
“How long is it until we get back to the others?” Zell asks, quietly.
“Okay.”
They all fall silent again. None of the three of them know what to say. Zell tries to imagine his mother, but the only people that come into his mind are Edea and Ma Dincht. And in a way, he thinks, he really is glad of that. They care about him, for him. For no other reason.
Selphie wonders how the others are doing, and whether they’ve found anything interesting while they were away. Something that might take Zell’s mind off things and get him interested in something else for a while. It’d be good if there was. Zell isn’t the brooding type, not like Squall – she shudders to think how Squall would’ve acted if things had turned out like this for him – but he’ll still think on something too long and get himself upset somehow.
He puts his foot down on the accelerator just that little bit more.
When they get back, Edea is waiting outside, as if she knows. The sun is setting and she is facing into it, shielding her eyes, as she did when they arrived the first time. She smiles at them as they get out of the car and doesn’t seem surprised when Zell comes to her and hugs her tightly.
“I told you that you shouldn’t go,” she says softly, holding him tightly. His face nestles into her shoulder as if it’s natural for it to be there. All of them fit so well into her arms, she thinks. So many children, all of them her own in some way, and none of them really hers.
Zell sniffs a little, and she holds him tighter. “You should have told me why not.”
“Sometimes,” she says, softly, more gently still, “mothers have to let their children make mistakes, so that they learn.”
“I’m glad I have you,” he says, softly. “Even if you’re not my real mother. I… the two people I think of as my mothers aren’t my real mothers and yet they love me much more than my real mother. I don’t understand.”
“Some people just aren’t made to be mothers.”
Zell hugs her tighter. Edea wonders if he realises. If he knows exactly how much she wanted a child of her own. If he realises that for her, he and all the others were just filling a gap in her life that she couldn’t seem able to fill for herself. But she thinks that would hurt him, if he knew.
And he means more than that to her, then and now.
Some people aren’t made to be mothers. Some people would love nothing more, and yet never quite get what they want.