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FFVIII: Origins (7)
Pairing: Irvine/Selphie, developing Seifer/Squall, developing Quistis/Rinoa
Warnings: Angst
Chapter: Seven
Rating: PG13
Summary: Some news for Quistis.
He’s not at Garden. It’s the middle of the night, he’s not at Garden, and his phone is ringing. Has already rung. Twice. Squall groans softly and wriggles out of his tight cocoon of blankets, groping for his phone and muttering vague insults at whoever is stupid enough to ring him at this time of night.
“Will you just answer that and shut it the fuck up?” Seifer groans. Squall looks up at him for a moment, narrowing his eyes in an almost-glare as he watches him snuggle down deeper into his bed, pulling the covers over his head. Then he gropes for his phone again, finding it by the lit up screen. He curses at the caller ID and presses a button to accept the call.
“Laguna? What the fuck are you calling me at this time of night for?”
“You know, you could start calling me dad. I mean, I am your dad and – “
“Laguna! What are you doing calling me at this time of night?”
He manages to sound sheepish when he finally responds. “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t even look at the time. I was working late and, well... do you want me to call you back in the morning or something?”
Squall groans softly and sits up, noting that even Zell, who generally sleeps like the dead, is starting to stir. Only
“Some of us aren’t quite,” Zell says, with a hint of a growl to his voice. He shifts around and after a moment Squall finds himself with a mouthful of pillow again. “Get out of here and talk on the phone elsewhere, Squall.”
“Yeah, Leonhart, get out of here.”
Squall makes a face. “Hang on a minute, Laguna. I’m going to go somewhere quiet so I don’t bother the others.”
“I’m really sorry I called at this time of night. I didn’t think. I suppose you’re thinking that I never do, or something. I know you think I’m a bit of a moron, but I really wouldn’t have called you if I had actually noticed the time. I was working late on reading through a new plan of Odine’s, and you know what he’s like, so I was kind of bored, and then... well, this came through.”
He’s only half-listening to Laguna’s babble, but it makes him smile anyway. His father has that affect on him somehow, whether he wants him to or not. There’s just something endearing about a guy like him, president of one of the most powerful countries in the world, babbling away like a kid eager to tell his mother what he’s done at school today.
“Alright,” he says, once he’s in the hallway and the door is closed behind him. He can hear Seifer and Zell grumbling to each other and then settling down into bed. “I’m in the hallway now. I wish you’d remember to check the time before you call me. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this to me.”
“Sorry,” Laguna says again, sounding more or less suitably contrite.
“Just… get on with telling me whatever you called at two in the morning to tell me.”
“Right, right,” Laguna takes a deep breath and scrabbles for a note where he wrote something down. Squall waits patiently, used to dealing with Laguna and calls at the oddest hours of the day and night. Finally, Laguna makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like ‘aha’, clearing his throat. “Right. Something pretty important came up, you see, so I wanted to call you as soon as possible…”
Squall tenses up slightly, his grip tightening on the phone. “Just hurry up and tell me what’s wrong, Laguna.”
“Oh, no, nothing’s wrong,” Laguna says, apologetically. “I hope I didn’t make it sound like that.”
“You did.”
“Sorry,” he says, again, and then pauses, this time, Squall thinks, more for dramatic effect than anything else. “Okay, you told me all about Selphie’s new quest, so I thought I’d make some enquiries on everyone’s behalf. I found two references you might be interested in. First, there was an Almasy in the army here when Adel was in power. Ummm… J… something… Almasy. I can’t quite read…”
Squall takes a deep breath; sure he knows what’s written on that note. He’s not sure whether he’s pleased or not that Seifer was right, that his father was a soldier. It does seem to make the chances of finding Seifer’s father alive a little less likely, but at the same time Seifer will probably pleased to find out that he was right about him. “Laguna, you wrote it.”
“I know, I know, my handwriting is horrible and I should probably get glasses…”
“Does it say James Almasy?”
“Yes.” Laguna sounds a little disappointed. “Did you know about him already?”
“Just his name. What was the other lead you have for us?
“I don’t think it really affects either of them,” he responds after a moment, an air of apology in his voice. “It’s to do with Quistis’ father. And, well, her mother too. But the thing is, her dad’s alive. Living in Esthar. One of Odine’s assistants, apparently, though I’ve never met him. Daniel Trepe.”
For a moment, Squall is tempted to repeat that in a dumbstruck tone of voice, but he shakes away the impulse and instead makes an almost intelligent noise. “Quisty’s father lives in Esthar?”
“Sure,” Laguna says, cheerfully. “His name’s right on this report I was looking through. Poor sod had to type it up, and there’s a number to call him if I have any questions. So I called him.”
“Please don’t say you called him just before you called me.”
“Ah…”
Squall shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache. “No, Laguna, I don’t really want to know. So what did this guy say?”
“Well, I think the best thing is if he tells his story directly to Quistis, you know? But, umm, the basics are, he had a relationship with her mother. The mother disappeared for a while – about a year – and then came back. She told him the whole of it quite a while later, when she was dying, but by then he had no idea how to find Quistis, and he didn’t want to bring her to Esthar anyway.”
“I see,” Squall says, quietly. “Can we –”
“Come tomorrow, whenever you like.”
He smiles slightly. Sometimes, his dad does get things right. Just sometimes. But it tends to be when he really does need to get things right, so it always works out fine, somehow. “I’ll tell her about it in the morning. It’s not worth disturbing her right now, I don’t think. Thank you for ringing me when you found this out.”
“Not a problem. You want me to look up more on Almasy?”
Squall thinks for a moment about the look he’s seen in Seifer’s eyes sometimes now. Longing. Hopeful. He takes a deep breath. “Yes. Please. If you have the time. Or get someone to look for you, in detail. I’ll pay –”
“I’ll have time,” Laguna says, blithely. “You seem a bit eager to do Seifer a favour considering you used to fight him.”
“Things change,” Squall mutters. He thinks longingly of bed, and of curling up under the warm covers, but with his luck, no doubt, the covers will have already shed all the warmth they gained from his body by the time he gets back to bed. There’s a part of him that considers sneaking into Seifer’s bed, curling around the warmth of him, and it’s an irrational part of him he wishes would shut up, fast, before it starts sounding like a good idea.
“Apparently so. I hope I’ll get chance to talk to you tomorrow?”
“We’ll all come.”
“Great! It’ll be good to see you. Just, ah…” Laguna sighs, his tone a little more subdued all of a sudden. “Tell Quistis to bring a box of tissues or three. It’s not a happy story, really.”
Squall nods slightly, even though Laguna can’t see him, biting his lip hard. “Okay.”
“It really will be nice to see you. Maybe I can steal a few hours of your time to go out to lunch or something, if you get here early enough? You’re not that far away. I’ve, umm… a conference, at two, but I can cancel. Or Kiros can cover for me. It’s not that important.”
“Laguna…”
“I mean it. You’re my son. I can afford to cancel a conference or two for you. Three, if you need me. That’s the way it should always have been.”
“But it wasn’t.”
Laguna sighs again, and Squall wants to kick himself for the sense of guilt that slides into his voice when he speaks. “I’m sorry. It should have been and I’ll do my best to make up for it. We’ve… had this conversation before. I don’t expect you to forgive me, I just want you to give me a chance –”
“It’s alright,” Squall says, quickly. “It’s alright.”
“Will you forgive me eventually?”
Squall sighs to himself, not entirely comfortable with just saying something important like this just like that on the phone. But with Laguna going on like that… “I already have. But right now, I’m about to retract that pardon if you don’t let me go off to bed.”
Laguna’s voice is bright with happiness as well as a little laughter when he responds: “Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you.”
Squall puts the phone down, turning it off so no one else can ring him. For a moment he feels vaguely guilty about that, but he’s pretty sure Xu won’t want to ring him at this time of morning Esthar-time even if she does need him. He heads back into the room he’s sharing with
Seifer is asleep. Squall notices that as he moves across to his own bed and then he just has to notice it a little more, noticing the way his face relaxes and he looks so much more, well, boyish. It makes Squall’s heart hurt a little to think that they could all look so much younger without the SeeD training that honed their instincts and made it so that every moment they’re assessing threats without any option to turn it off.
It’s not his fault, but somehow, as the commander of Garden, even if he didn’t found any of that, it is. He thinks of all the kids learning to become killers and bites his lip hard.
After a moment, he turns and heads to his own bed, cursing almost silently when he finds the sheets are, as predicted, freezing cold.
---
“Can you pass me the cereal?”
“Sure. The milk as well?”
“Please.”
Squall sits quietly, not reading the paper that’s in front of him but wondering how to tell Quistis that there’s good news and bad news and that he’s already arranged for her to go and get both. There’s something comforting about the whole scenario, the girls having breakfast, the guys already mostly finished. He’s never understood why girls tend to take so long to get ready on a morning. Makeup can’t take that long to put on, unless you’re really clumsy and keep getting it wrong.
Seifer watches Squall, half-amused and half-worried by the usual I’m thinking so leave me alone expression he has that he remembers so well from before the war. Squall’s scar crinkles a little, in a way that makes Seifer think about applying the word cute to Squall Leonhart.
He has a feeling that if he said that, Squall might check his temperature, or just send him immediately to a doctor. But it’s true. Squall looks cute. And if that’s a girly thing to think, well, fuck, he’s gay anyway, he has a perfect right to go a bit further with it sometimes when describing someone like Squall. Someone he, well, admires. In that wants to pin him to a bed and have his way with him sort of way.
It’s only recently that Seifer has allowed himself to admit that even to himself. As in, in the past day. Or possibly just the past few minutes. There’s something about Squall frowning in thought and crinkling his scar that Seifer is sure has to make even straight guys come over a little ‘admiring’ sometimes.
“I got a call from my dad last night,” Squall says, finally, trying to be casual. Seifer raises an eyebrow at him, but Zell beats him to actually speaking.
“I remember. It woke me up.”
“What was it about?” Rinoa asks, curiously, pouring milk on her cereal and splashing a little all over the place when she doesn’t pay quite enough attention. Quistis leans over, looking amused, to mop it up, and Rinoa smiles thankfully at her as she settles back with her breakfast and looks up at Squall again.
“He found out a couple more things to help us on our ‘quest’.”
“Yes! I knew Sir Laguna would get involved!”
“Seifer, your father’s name was found in a list of Estharian soldiers. You were right about him,” Squall says, quietly, looking up at him with a look in his eyes as if he’s afraid Seifer will react badly. Actually, he can’t help but smile – trying but failing to just bite it back when Squall smiles as well. “I’ve asked him to look up any more information he can find, he’ll be doing some digging today.”
“Thank you,” he says, awkwardly. “I… I don’t deserve… especially from Esthar… thank you.”
“You can thank my dad in person,” Squall says, with just a hint of a wicked smile. “We’ll be seeing him later on.”
Quistis raises an eyebrow. “We were in Esthar shopping just yesterday, why’re we going back?”
He takes a deep breath, not sure what to say, not sure how much to say. He told Laguna he’d tell her to bring tissues but he doesn’t want to bring her down just like that. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much. Finally, he looks up and meets her eyes. “Laguna found your father. Your mother is dead, but your father is alive and living in Esthar. And waiting for you to come and talk to him today.”
The crash and cracking sound as Quistis drops her cereal isn’t entirely unexpected, and Squall is more or less pleased, all things considered, that she managed not to spill any on herself or anyone around. The look on her face would be comical if it wasn’t brought on by what he’d just said, and Squall experiences a familiar feeling of anxiety. He never knows what to do when people act like that.
“I’m sorry,” he says, awkwardly, sighing just a little in relief as Rinoa puts her own cereal aside and moves closer to Quistis, putting a comforting arm around her. He’s glad he doesn’t have to do that. He always feels completely stiff and tense and awkward when he tries to comfort people and the opposite of comforting tends to be the result.
“It’s… it’s not your fault,” Quistis says, shaking her head and pushing Rinoa away gently. She moves to clear up her mess, looking as if she suddenly isn’t hungry anymore. Rinoa helps her and Seifer gives Squall a look that is almost sympathetic.
“I told Laguna we’d be going to Esthar today. Is that okay?”
Quistis nods slightly, still looking rather numb. She tries to laugh, a little shaky, once everything is cleared up. “I didn’t think I’d find anyone for me, it was a bit of a shock… and to know that one of parents is still alive. I… I hope it doesn’t turn out,” she glances at Zell and decides not to be too blunt in her reference to what happened with him and his father, “well, badly.”
Selphie takes a deep breath and then gets up, going to hug Quistis tightly. “Well, you know, it’s a shock, but it’s a good thing! We’re here to find out about our parents, and though I don’t know what it feels like to find out something, I’m sure it’s a bit weird. Still, Quisty, you can’t let that get in your way. This is your dad. And we already know he actually wants to talk to you. So everything is going to be okay somehow, I bet.”
Squall watches Selphie’s enthusiasm guardedly. There’s something off about it – though I don’t know what it feels like… He sighs. He could’ve predicted something like that happening. Selphie is too nice to act completely jealous towards Quistis, but it’s clear enough that she wishes someone had found her parents – either of them – and that she thinks that Quistis should be happy to know anything.
“It’s okay,”
He smiles a little in thanks for that and looks away quickly, not wanting
“It’s great, Quistis! Come on, smile a bit!”
Quistis tries. Selphie smiles and Rinoa smiles and Quistis tries, but Squall can still see she’s worrying about what’s going to happen. Now he almost wishes he’d forced more of the story out of Laguna, so he knew how much to tell her, how he wanted to play it. He hates playing when he can only see half his hand, so to speak. Although he’s never really played card games so he doesn’t know if that’s an accurate sort of comparison.
Selphie frowns slightly, looking around at everyone. “So… when Quisty is talking to her dad, what’re the rest of us going to do?”
“Shop?” Squall suggests, shrugging slightly. “I’m going out to lunch with my dad, apparently.”
Rinoa glances at Quistis, takes a breath and then looks up at Selphie. “Sorry, Selphie, but I don’t feel like shopping. I’ll stay with Quistis. Well, not with her, not if she doesn’t want me to, but close to her. I don’t mind hanging around for a while and I suppose it must be really strange to meet your father when you’ve thought you were an orphan all your life. Uh… if that’s okay with you, Quistis?”
Quistis nods slightly. “I… thank you for the offer.”
She smiles brightly. “You’re welcome.”
“So…” Zell looks up for more or less the first time, smiling a grin which is comfortably like his usual one. “We’re all going to Esthar and we have to get Squall there in time to have lunch with Laguna. Why are we all sitting around doing nothing and arranging things we could just as easily arrange in the car? Let’s all go and finish getting ready already.”
Seifer snorts softly and gets up. “For once, the chickenwuss has a point. C’mon, Squally-boy, cowboy, let’s go finish getting ready. Put our makeup on and all that.”
Rinoa pouts at him. “You’re making fun of us.”
“Only a little, princess,” he says, smirking. “I do have some things I need to put together.”
Zell grins at Rinoa. “And he does use eyeliner. I’ve seen it.”
He yelps loudly when he gets kicked in the ankle, while Seifer spends a few seconds looking as innocent as he possibly can before getting up and sprinting for the door. Squall watches them go, looking a little confused. “Why are they acting like children?”
Rinoa makes a face. “They’re getting old. It’s an early second childhood.”
“Alternatively,” Quistis observes, “they still haven’t finished their first childhood.”
Squall shakes his head, hearing the vague sound of a crash from another room. “I’m going to go and see what they’re doing. Selphie,
Rinoa looks up at him quickly, startled by the way he effectively took the other two out of the room. For a moment she wonders if he realises – Squall, otherwise known as the most clueless guy in Garden – how she feels about Quistis. How she wants to feel about Quistis, anyway, if she can get closer to her and allow herself to fall that little bit further. But he shows no sign of knowing, simply smiling at her just a little and leaving the room, followed by Selphie and
“Are you okay?”
Quistis shrugs slightly, smiling just a little in an attempt at reassuring her. “Fine. Just… I’m not sure I’m looking forward to speaking to my father. It’s pretty much bound to be rather weird and I’m not completely sure I even want to know anymore. Curiosity killed the cat, after all. On the other hand, I think it’d be maddening not to know. I hope my father is nothing like Zell’s…”
She puts a hand on Quistis’ shoulder gently. “If you want to get away, I’ll be right there to drag you off into Esthar to find the others, so we can come back here.”
Quistis smiles, more genuinely now. “Thank you, Rinoa.”
She laughs softly. “This is what friends are for, right? Besides. I’m sick of going shopping.”
---
For a moment, Quistis doesn’t believe that this man can be her father. He’s tall, thin, worried and tired. He looks as if he hasn’t been happy in a long time, but when he looks at her, she sees that he has her eyes – though his are sadder than hers have ever been. Rinoa leaves the room quietly, closing the door behind her, and Quistis barely registers it, looking up at her father and biting her lip.
“Daniel Trepe, I presume?” she asks, trying to sound – formal. Untouched. She gets up to shake his hand when he nods, but he doesn’t take her hand. Instead, he reaches up to touch her face.
“Quistis. You look like your mother.”
There’s something about that touch – something tender, something that longs for something that was lost or never had – that makes Quistis’ eyes fill with tears despite herself. She nods, dumbly, wanting to ask what her mother was like, why she looks like her, what her mother acted like, sounded like. She wants to know, all of a sudden, everything, but she can’t get a word out. Her father smiles at her, suddenly looking a lot less sad, and she can’t help but smile back.
“Perhaps a bit more beautiful,” he says, quietly. He motions for her to sit back down again and pulls up a chair of his own – not too close to her, but close enough to be able to watch her carefully, obviously eager for anything – everything – he can learn about this unknown daughter of his. “But very much like her. I still miss her.”
“How did you meet her?”
It’s as good a starting place as any, as good a question to start with as any of the ones that are suddenly multiplying inside her head, and he nods slightly, sitting back in his seat. He doesn’t seem to want to take his eyes off her and she lowers her gaze, blushing a little under his scrutiny and hoping quietly that she matches up to his standards.
“I’m one of Odine’s lab assistants. I don’t approve of many of his experiments and investigations, but this is something I can do, so I do it.” He shrugs slightly, looking up at her as if expecting some kind of judgement for that, and looking slightly relieved when she nods for him to go on. “Your mother was, like you, I think, a Blue Mage. Odine took an interest in her because of her unique form of magic…”
“You were assigned to study her?”
He nods. She almost expected him to look sadder, more tired, now that he’s talking about these things, but in fact he brightens a little, actually smiling. “We… we fell in love. At least, I did, I’m not sure if she ever loved me back. She was very patient, very professional. She hadn’t volunteered to be studied and yet she still acted like she had, saying that things we found out from her could prove important. Anyway. After a few months of being with me – about half a year – she disappeared. She just… left. We assumed that she’d gotten sick of it and used her innate magic to help herself leave.”
Quistis bites her lip. “She never came back?”
“Oh, she did.” Daniel smiles, looking up at his daughter like he can’t believe she’s really there. “About a year later, she came back. She came into my room and just stood there and laughed and asked me if I’d missed her. She was… tired. Thin. But she was back. She didn’t tell me what had happened or why she’d left, not for a long time.”
Quistis finds herself moving a little closer to her father, moving to the edge of the seat and meeting his eyes earnestly, still feeling the sting and burn of tears wanting to fall. There’s something so sad and so precious and so strange about knowing that here is her father that she can’t help it. “Why did she tell you in the end?”
“She was dying,” he says, simply, bleakly. Quistis looks away.
“Oh. I’m… sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. Anyway, she told me that she left because she was having a child… my child, obviously. She told me that she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of the child being brought up in a lab, to be little more to Odine than a lab rat. Even though she’d found love in a lab, she didn’t think it was any atmosphere for her daughter. You. She left, not telling anyone where she went, and took you to an Orphanage. She wouldn’t tell me where, in case Odine found out. And by the time she told me, it would’ve been hard to track you down. And she was right. Odine’s lab is no place for a young lady.” He bites his lip, looking up at Quistis for a long moment, as if trying to memorise her. “She told me your name, and that’d you’d been given my surname. I never thought…”
“You never thought you’d meet me?”
“Right,” he says, trying to laugh lightly.
“I didn’t think I’d meet you, either,” Quistis says, quietly. She gets up and goes to him, puts her arms around him and hugs him gently. “Tell me more about my mother. Tell me everything.”
She closes her eyes when his arms wrap around her in return. It feels so strange, and so wonderful, to be held by her father. She never thought it would happen, and though it hurts to know her mother is long gone, she does have family and that somehow puts a whole new light on all the time spent on her own, being strong, being untouchable, trying to be the best she could so as not to shame her family even if they’re all dead.
She always wanted to feel that someone was proud of her. Most of all the people she could never please because she could never even be sure they ever cared.
She has a feeling that Daniel Trepe would be proud of her no matter what. She has a feeling that he knows everything that has happened to her, that he has made a point of knowing everything he can.
But she tells him anyway, when he’s talked himself into silence. And he listens, and smiles. And when she gets up to leave, feeling guilty about leaving Rinoa sat out there, he stands up as well and takes her hand in his. “You’ll come and talk to me again?”
“Of course,” she says, softly, filled with affection for him, for this man who is suddenly no longer a stranger, a man who suddenly really does feel like her father no matter how odd the feeling is.
“I’m proud of you, you know.”
The tears come again and she nods, hugging him one more time. “Thank you.”
“See you soon,” he says, turning to go out of the other door. She’s almost reluctant to go, just in case it all turns out to be a dream, but he grins at her all of a sudden as he leaves and that makes her smile and she goes out herself, shutting the door behind her.
Rinoa is waiting for her. She takes one look at her face and holds her arms out and Quistis accepts the hug, stepping close to her and wrapping her arms around her tightly. They fit together well and Quistis closes her eyes, finding another tear running down her cheek. Rinoa reaches up with a smile, brushing it away with her thumb, almost stroking Quistis’ cheek, but shying away.
“It went well, then.”
“I’m so glad I met him,” she whispers, into Rinoa’s hair. “Selphie’s quest really was a good idea. I never thought I’d find anything, and now…”
“You’re so lucky,” Rinoa whispers back, holding her tighter. She seems to know not to pull away yet and Quistis is happy to stand there, taking the comfort and the shared joy, and trying not to think about kissing Rinoa, finally taking control of the situation and doing something she so desperately wants to do.
“Selphie’s right to be jealous.”
“I think we’ll all be a little jealous. Even me.”
Quistis tightens her arms around Rinoa for a moment and then finally steps away, wiping her face carefully and smiling, smiling through the tears like a rainbow when the sun shines through the rain. Rinoa smiles back and takes her hand.
“Come on. Let’s go and find the others.”
“Okay,” Quistis says, and follows her out of the palace, feeling much happier, somehow, than when she went in.
If she went back in time to tell herself this morning that everything would turn out alright, Quistis knows she wouldn’t believe herself. But for once, it really has. She hopes – thinking of Rinoa’s hand in hers and Rinoa’s pretty smile – that things will turn out okay a few more times.
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I also refuse to admit that I almost teared up a little reading about Quistis.no subject
Apparently, you're not the only one. There is no need to be ashamed!