Who: Quistis. Can be open, can work as a solo. Either way! What: Good old fashioned panic attack Where: Her room, halls, outside When: As shit is hitting the fan on the Garden Network Ratings: Language at the very least
First, she'd tried to take it down herself. Then she'd tried to reassure Seifer, and found she didn't have the words. Third, she'd sent a series of angry, increasingly panicked messages to Squall. Finally, she'd started to write a message to Xu when she received one instead.
Things did not fall apart in an explosion or in an instant, but in slow fluttering movements like snow in the wind. Everything within Quistis started to fall, and then became very tight. Her eyes burned. Her chest burned. Bile rose in her throat and she jumped to her feet, her desk chair falling over with a thud.
When she'd first seen the Mognet posts a storm had erupted within Quistis; conflicted rages and reactions battling for power within her mind. Her go-to was always to ignore it. She was used to gossip, she was used to ugly things being said from behind the veil of anonymity, and the best course was always to just ignore it. Rationally, she knew that. Yet there was an irrational being within Quistis, a monster not so unlike a threatened mother wolf protecting its young. She wanted to lash out. She wanted to destroy. She simultaneously wanted to nurture, to protect -- to run straight to Matron and make sure she was okay, because it all felt so very much like a threat to her. But there was so much more. She had wanted to march down to the training center and kill anything that looked at her, she had wanted to take charge of the situation and make everything right, but she didn't know what the right thing was. She had suddenly realized that in this situation, in this very fucked up situation, her judgment counted for shit. She was too close to it or too damaged or too short-sighted to know what she needed to do to fix it. To Quistis, that was a failure.
Quistis Trepe had never been particularly skilled with accepting her own failures.
She needed to not be there. She needed to not be alone. She needed someone to step in and tell her it was okay to not have her shit together for five minutes. She needed someone she trusted, someone objective, someone who could and would know what to do, and that one message had felt like a slap in the face. Xu had always been her rock, but she couldn't, or perhaps simply wouldn't go to Xu for this. Not now.
Slamming her door behind her Quistis started at a fast pace, slowly building up into an outright run. Her heart was pounding and she knew something bad was coming, and she had to be away, far far away before that could happen. Her surroundings were a blur as she ran through the halls and out the doors, past the gates and parking lot, away from the road and into the green. She ran until her legs finally buckled, and she collapsed on all fours onto the grass. Okay, she thought. I can deal with this now.
But she couldn't. The images and feelings appeared in her mind's eye and she squeezed her eyes shut. She remembered what it was like to remember her childhood, to remember Seifer and Matron - and then have to turn around and fight them. She had fought against them both, more importantly against Matron, against the closest thing she had ever had to a mother, and it had been with the intent to kill if necessary or possible. The foe in front of her had not been her matron anymore, but it possessed her body, and if she had to destroy one to destroy the other then it was what they had to do, and she'd known that, but it hadn't been easy. The nightmares didn't come as frequently as they used to, but they still came. Usually when she least expected it.
This was not a nightmare, but it felt very similar. She was prisoner in her own mind and body as she relived it, and some very small, soft rational part of her brain told her it was just a flashback and it would go away, but it wasn't. It couldn't be. It felt real. She remembered every beat of her heart and snap of her whip and bolt of magic. Every flash in Matron's eyes. The taste of blood from biting the inside of her cheek.
It passed, as it always did, but the taste of blood remained.