Final Fantasy VIII Hush

Hi again everyone. So here's another little short of mine... a distinctly romantic Squall/Rinoa, in that angsty Squall Leonhart-ish manner. Set before the final battle. Don't you love men with excessive amounts of broodiness?  
  
Love it? Hate it? Don't really care? Let me know, and thank you all for reviewing this and my other stories! Standard disclaimer, also: I don't own Final Fantasy 8, I only lust after it.  
  
      **  

Hush

**  
  
        "Sometimes I'm so, so scared," she told him under her breath. So her voice was all husky and a whisper that carried a thousand more meanings than the obvious.  
  
        "...I know," he replied a little more than stiffly. He did not know, however, yet he somehow found himself using the words. It was pretense. When had Squall Leonhart started using pretense?  
  
        It was evening, he figured by his internal clock. Or at least, evening in the reality he knew. The one he was trying to save. In here, wherever here was, time seemed to stagnate. Even outside of the decaying red castle, the sky always remained the same threatening half-twilight color. It was the color of half-sleep, of being caught between consciousness and thick, real rest. It was the color of water used to wash a paintbrush, the color of every other color faded and melded together until it possessed no identity, no meaning, no truth. It was the color of nightmares.  
  
        There were no stars in this world.  
  
        They seemed hidden, cloaked, like the Sorceress who ruled this world had swept them from the sky in anger. Or like they had run away. He remembered a time when he would have liked this endless, starless expanse. The smooth, unbroken skin of the sky would have been comforting, steady and steadying. The twisted gray might have been the same color he saw in his own eyes. A shade that reflected apathy, an apathy that had been used to blanket something else, something vulnerable and wounded but hidden for so long that it was all but forgotten.  
  
        But tonight the sky seemed criminal.  
  
        Tomorrow, they would enter the great looming gates, go beyond the wrought- iron seal of safety and challenge the Sorceress. Ultimecia. Was it right to think of a woman you wanted to kill by her first name? Time compression. The end. Fin. And that was where their fate would lie: beyond those gates. He was sure of it, had accepted it sometime ago. He didn't like the idea of being reduced to an inactive participant in his own life, but that was the way it seemed to end despite all his best attempts. He was a stained glass figure, cut carefully enough to fool anyone looking that he was real, but incapable of moving beyond the position he was birthed into. Destiny accounted for all your attempts to change it. Destiny couldn't be fooled. And Squall did not have the energy to try.  
  
        So that was that. They would live, and the rest of the world would live with them. Or they would die, and it would not matter that the world would suffer and call them failures. They would be referred to in past tense, and they would be forgotten.  
  
        That was reason enough to fight, to live, wasn't it? But lately even that didn't seem completely right to Squall. Lately it seemed that there was something beyond ideology, something to fight for besides the orders of higher command, or the misty philosophies of a teenage boy. He could just barely grasp it, just barely taste and smell it... but it was there. If only he could place a name on it.  
  
It was frustrating and perplexing. Everything was changing around him, without him. Or maybe he was changing as well, and that was what he found frustrating. Maybe everything he had thought was wrong, his faith shattered, and he was left drifting without a compass.  
  
        He wished there were at least one star out tonight to find his way by.  
  
        Beside him, she moved quietly, her breathing even but strained. She didn't possess the same predatory grace the rest of them, trained in military academies, did. Rather, hers was a different sort altogether, a sort of eloquent movement that poured forth a hundred-thousand emotions at once. She edged closer to him, sat near him so that if an onlooker blurred his eyes the two of them would blend together in overlap. Her dark hair falling like a cape over porcelain skin, he could just barely make out her face. Her hand fell to her side, a slender and smooth slip against the cold, dusty ground.  
  
        "It's so quiet," she whispered, breaking the silence that he, too, had noticed.  
  
        Outside, the halfway-false nature was just as surreal as the inside of the witch's palace, which itself moaned and creaked as if it were alive and sighing under the weight of the history it carried. There were no animals outside, no creatures of any sort besides them, and the mausoleum silence felt as tight as a noose. The open air was just as suffocating as the castle.  
  
        Squall shifted his back against the rock he was leaning on, body propped up and ready to spring at any sign of danger. Not that he thought that would happen; there didn't seem to be a sign of anything at all for miles around.  
  
        He didn't respond to her, although he could feel her trepidation as easily as if it were his own. Their emotions were like that as of late, and he wondered how much of it was magic. How much of it was natural. Slowly, he moved his arm over and slid his hand over hers. Their fingers fell together seamlessly, like it was instinct.  
  
        Rinoa turned her hand into his touch instantly, like she craved it. It took him longer to respond. His long fingers unused to feeling anything but the inside of his gloves, Squall moved carefully and deliberately. He didn't know why he wasn't wearing gloves, in fact. It wasn't often at all that he touched other people, and her skin felt electric against his, their temperatures melting together until they were the same. Her hand was soft, uncalloused and unblemished as his index finger traced a pattern along her palm.  
  
        _Don't they always say the lines on your palms can tell your future? Money. Life. Love._  
  
        But why bother knowing the future if it inevitably ended up so... anticlimactic? After all, what would his mother have felt like if she had known she was to die in childbirth and could do nothing to change it? What would Seifer have felt if he had discovered he would never have made SeeD and become lapdog to a maniacal woman?  
  
        What would he have felt if he had known all of... this... would have happened to him?  
  
        The last time he had touched her, had really _felt_ her beyond a simple brush, had felt her emotions and her insecurities and her personality, had been on the Ragnarok. In the cold, empty perfection of space, where it had seemed that they were the only people in existence, and that nothing which mattered in the real world really mattered at all. He had felt her weight against him, delicate but tangible.  
  
        And he knew that he needed it.  
  
        They didn't need to talk, and he appreciated that. It was his way, and she seemed to understand that. She seemed to understand that you didn't need to know everything about someone to know who they were. Talk was the realm of Seifer Almasy taunting him for thirteen years, the realm of Quistis Trepe thinking she could unravel him, the realm of Irvine Kinneas thinking happiness was a physical phenomena. Talk was broken smiles and shrouded eyes.  
  
        The two of them, he and Rinoa, knew each other in an entirely different way. She saw past his pretense, she saw past his shields. In his eyes she found something worthwhile, something flawed and scarred and lost at times... but worthwhile.  
  
        Or at least, so Squall liked to think. And it didn't really matter if he was right or not, what mattered was that he was willing to think so.  
  
        He pulled her hand over a bit, so that they rested, fingers entwined, on his bent knee.  
  
        He furrowed his eyebrows the slightest bit, into the almost calculating gaze that crossed his face when he thought too much. "Everything's changing so fast," his voice was deep, as cloudy as his eyes sometimes seemed.  
  
She pursed soft lips, tightened her fingers in his a bit, "Do you want them to change, Squall?"  
  
        The way she said his name sounded like a blessing, or a prayer. It sounded entirely different, so much more pleasant, than the way everyone else, including himself, voiced it. Verging on the way Matron used to say his name, when he could pull the memory from his shady and spotty recollections, yet infinitely more. With the same sort of stable and soothing grace.  
  
        "I just... I used to think I was so sure of myself," his forehead wrinkled even more and he hung his head a bit lower, chestnut hair falling forward. He used his free hand to trace fingers along the length of his scar.  
  
        Rinoa smiled a little, turned so that her deep, large brown eyes rested on his face. "Confusion has a sort of clarity, though. It's better than blindly believing in one truth, don't you think?"  
  
        He sighed a little, softly, turned his stare to look at her through his wayward bangs. "I just wish I had something to count on." And it was the truth wasn't it? Much as he needed her, her reality was just as volatile as his. Her beauty, her enticing face and inviting body, concealed something he didn't want to think about. Hidden within her was a truth that was just as terrifying as his future. She needed constancy as much as he did.  
  
        And he could not even provide her that much.  
  
        She was seventeen, barely old enough to figure out her own feelings for him, let alone play the role of inheritor of a millennia-old power. And here he was, weighing her with his own troubles. Of course she knew that he didn't care if she was part of an ancient succession. But she cared, and that mattered more.  
  
        Rinoa moved slowly, reached out with her left hand and brushed his cheek gently. He felt so good against her, better than silk on her skin or even magic through her skin. He was her addiction, her obsession, and she knew this for certain.  
  
        "You're still the same person at heart, you know that." He closed his eyes at her words, feeling her touch with a sensitivity heightened by its foreignness. "Nothing's changing unless you want it to. You're just... finding parts of you that you thought you'd forgotten."  
  
        He let her rest her hand against his neck, in a position that seemed a mimicry of lovers parting from a kiss, and bit back his words. He wanted to tell her that it didn't matter if she was right or not, he would believe her. He wanted to tell her that all he wanted was to run away from everything and be seventeen with her. He wanted to lie on the beach with her, and pretend they led unhaunted lives. Touch lips in kisses alive with seawater and salt, and run sandy hands along her skin, and get drunk at night, and set off illegal fireworks. Laugh.  
  
        But that was not his way. And that was not her way now, either.  
  
        Perhaps, he thought, they would have a happy ending. Perhaps there would be an ever-after. But he didn't like to count on that at all; fate had a way of letting him down like that. But even if there wasn't, she had brought him this far. She, with her chocolate eyes that did not have any of the double meanings he saw in everybody else's, was the reason beyond ideology. She made him remember.  
  
        "All I want is to be in control. I don't want to let people down." _I don't want to let you down._  
  
        She grew bolder, her body flushed with his warmth and his scent of forests and leather and soap, and leaned her forehead against his temple, her chin resting against his shoulder. Squall tensed for a second, then relaxed into the naturalness of her touch. The things she did made him capable of acting without thinking, without analyzing until his brain wanted to explode. She was intuition, something he could trust without reasoning why.  
  
        "You've come so far already, done so much" her breath was warm against his neck, and he was beginning to lose himself in her presence. He could feel her everywhere. "You couldn't ever let anyone down."  
  
        He swallowed hard, "All I wanted was to be a soldier."  
  
        She let out a short, clear laugh. It rang through the night like something holy. "All I wanted was for Timber to be free."  
  
        He looked at their hands, woven together in his lap, and ran his other once through his hair. Since when did he think it alright to be so close to someone else? He found this desperate need, this disturbing romanticism to be disgusting. He didn't want it, it wasn't him. It made him weak, it was like a sickness. Or was it really like Rinoa had said, and this too was merely something he thought he had hidden away in his mind too well to be rediscovered?  
  
        When this whole ordeal had started, everything had seemed so certain, so straightforward. It was supposed to be simple, cut and dry, and he was not supposed to have been scarred, and the bullet was supposed to stop the sorceress, and Seifer was not supposed to be her knight, and he was not supposed to have caught a javelin of ice in his chest, and Rinoa was not supposed to be possessed, and Adel was not supposed to have awakened, and it was never supposed to come this far.  
  
        And would he have accepted never meeting Rinoa Heartilly for all of that to be changed?  
  
        She spoke again, shifting her head so that she rested in the curve between his neck and shoulder, "I guess you just do the best with what happens."  
  
        Squall leaned the slightest bit into her embrace.  
  
        "I want you to know," he started, slightly afraid of what he was getting himself into, "that you... you mean something to me, Rinoa."  
  
        He swallowed, staring off into the distance before continuing.  
  
        "And I might not ever be able to say what that something is," he felt her fingers in his, smooth but strong, and he felt her subtle power like electricity course through him, "but I can't give up on it now. Tomorrow, if something happens, I want you to know this."  
  
        _If something happens._ If I die. If you die. If we both die, if we both walk away.  
  
        He had not fallen in love with her at first sight, that was the only the stuff of fairytales and bedtime stories. But he had fallen, and something in him had broken, and when it had happened did not matter so much as that it did happen. There was no turning back now.  
  
        "I admire you," his voice was steady, "for still being here. For being able to be afraid now."  
  
        When he was around her, it did not seem quite so difficult to say things that actually said something.  
  
        He felt her smile against the collar of his shirt, "Squall, living isn't about admiration and respect, rankings and orders of command. It isn't about fear. The world might be, but living isn't." Her lips were almost moving against his pale skin now, "What this is means so much more than just that."  
  
        And the way she said this, he was sure she understood just what he was feeling.  
  
        He let himself sigh against her hair, hair that smelled of flowerfields in Centra and clean snow in Trabia and grassy bluffs in Winhill and seashores in Balamb. So quietly she was the only one who could possibly hear it, "I could never have come this far without you."  
  
        Rinoa smiled, distinctly aware that this was not what a cold, unapproachable man had turned into, but rather what he had been all along. "And we never could have gotten here without you."  
  
        There was a soft desperation, a quiet urgency, to her voice, "Trust me."  
  
        His jaw relaxed imperceptibly, the corner of his mouth moving up ever so slightly in the closest thing to a smile that he had created in over a decade. "I do." _ I can._  
  
        As they waited together, Squall became aware that everything in his own reality was just as false as the sky in this one. But maybe, if he found enough truth in something else, not constancy but truth, then it would not matter.  
  
        She murmured, and her lips did touch his neck as she spoke this time, "I'll never leave, you know that right?"  
  
        "Yeah, I know," and the answer felt natural to him, right without having to justify it.  
  
        So that was it then. Maybe when one's faith was broken, it was simply a way to find another. As he watched the castle's silhouette, taunting him to challenge its mistress, and felt the weight of Rinoa against his body, the shape of her body familiar from somewhere like a dream, he knew. His fate wasn't a battle, it wasn't a victory or a defeat. His fate, his destiny, was a decision distilled down and existing in the girl next to him. He had decided.  
  
        It was her... she was his star. And suddenly the sky did not look so threatening. 


End file.
