we were born of dreamers, so a dreamer i'll remain even if i'm the only one. WHO: Rinoa Heartilly & Seifer Almasy. WHAT: Sorry, this is a backdated log -- Rinoa goes to visit her ex in the infirmary after a dragon fucks him up. WHEN: August 4th, shortly after the dragon attack. WHERE: The infirmary.
The sight of his crumpled body had made her heart stop.
Rinoa had barely been able to process that he’d taken a blow for her, from a dragon of all things. Only a heartbeat prior had time been an unforgiving current, plowing angrily and unforgivingly across the stadium. Yet in this most horrible moment, where the one person she’d believed to be invincible had risen up in all his glorious mortality, time slowed to a crawl, slithering down her spine, into her veins, twisting around her neck, around her wrist--but no, that was Fujin’s hand, tugging insistently. There was little the slighter girl could do but follow, feet moving even as her eyes refused to budge, mouth open in a scream: his name, inaudible amidst the chaos.
Throwing herself into evacuation efforts had been a suitable distraction, but when the chaos finally died down, there was nothing to stop her from rushing to the medbay. Leaving Angelo in her room, she dashed down the lobby, into the medical complex. The visitors’ log book was signed with little fanfare, her scrawled signature a far cry from the elegant inscription it usually was. Her breath was heavy and strained by the time she gently opened the door to his room and curled into the seat beside his cot.
Chest moving steadily up and down, Seifer Almasy rested. Rinoa drank him in, her gaze dashing furiously to assess the bloody bandages that had no doubt been hurriedly strung together. She knew nothing of treating the injured, yet her fingers twitched with the urge to do something, to heal in whatever way she could manage.
Hesitantly, she reached out to tuck in the errant ends of an emergency tourniquet, movements gentle so as not to wake him. “Basic first aid, right?” she said to herself, voice soft. “No knot ends sticking out.”
The cool, feather-light touch of her fingers against his wrist (Rinoa always did like feathers) was like a gentle reminder of something he’d forgotten -- You were supposed to fill up on Potions this week, muttered the chiding voice in the back of his head. But that didn’t make any sense, did it? Her voice, on the other hand, was like an anchor dragging him out of that groggy sump. A thread to follow on its meandering path to his cot with the papery-thin pillow and rustling sheets. He wasn’t so much swimming his way back to consciousness but thrashing and fighting his way towards it -- Seifer Almasy always fought.
His eyes cracked open, temporarily glued shut with their own bleariness, and he saw the infirmary flicker back into view. Familiar outlines of grey steel and white glass. Tiled floors. Clinical walls, bare of everything but medical charts. Slatted window-shades. The spiderwebbed blue symbol of Balamb Garden plastered across the ceiling.
He couldn’t even count the number of times he’d woken up here. The faces upon waking always changed -- most times it was Kadowaki or Noah, the former disapproving while the latter laughed; Fujin or Raijin, at least until Rai got thrown out for being too loud around the sleeping patients; one time it was Quistis, seated primly on a chair with one leg crossed over the other and a pile of essays balanced in her lap; another time it was Squall, hunched over with his fist balled under his chin. Once the boy had assured himself that the other gunbladist still lived, he’d gotten up in silence and left.
Rinoa Heartilly, though. That was something new.
“Of all the infirmaries, in all the Gardens, in all the world, she walks into mine,” Seifer said, already delivering a cracked grin.
“With the whole world crumbling, we pick this time to...” Rinoa interrupted herself with a laugh. Not appropriate, not now. They were at the cusp of something, she knew, but whether or not that led back into where they’d began, she could not say. Nor would she dare impose the possibility upon him, even as the thought delighted her like nothing else had in a long time. (Since he’d left.)
After all, what did she know of the events that had transpired between then and now, shaping him into the man in the cot, body marred and broken, but eyes indomitable and undefeated? She herself was not the same girl he’d met then, giddy with dreams and plans, drunk on the revelry of her youth. She was a woman now, a woman with purpose, he a man with scars whose stories she could not tell. How many more were there than when she’d known him? And how many others had traced them as she had, fingers curious and lips parted with wonder?
The deep scar criss-crossing his brow was definitely new. It marred the landscape of his face, changing it somehow, causing a shift in his expressions and mapping new territories in Seifer’s look. But after the sight of the scar had settled in and made itself at home, it was hard imagining him as anything else. Whenever someone unearthed older pictures of the blond, the pristine forehead looked strange and naked somehow, missing something that made him Seifer. It was a part of him now. He wore it with pride, unabashed and unselfconscious.
Retracting her hands almost guiltily, she asked, “How are you feeling, cadet extraordinaire?”
“Hmm.” It was a noncommittal noise, nothing more than a grunt in the back of his throat as he levered himself up in the cot, wincing. Seifer himself wasn’t even sure what the damage was like; all he remembered was the sight of a dragon rearing up before him, the hard impact of scales knocking the breath out of his lungs, the sickening crunch of twisted bone, the gnarled claws. (An eerily familiar sight, one from his dreams and nightmares alike. The sorceress’ knight versus the mighty dragon.)
“Not sure. Been better, but I’ve definitely been worse. Could you grab me that chart?” He pointed to the foot of his bed where the clipboard dangled, decorated in Kadowaki’s near-unintelligible script. Good thing he’d had years of practice reading it. “And promise not to peek.”
“Okay.” Rinoa stood up and walked to retrieve it, then extended it over to him, a hand dramatically pressed over her eyes. She waited patiently (or not at all, her lips curled in a grin, the outstretched arm shaking merrily) for Seifer to swipe it from her. Once he had, she collapsed ungracefully back into her seat.
“I take it you’re here often,” she mused, watching him go through his chart. “Is it every day you rescue damsels in distress from horrifying beasts?”
The smile broadened even as he didn’t meet her eyes, attention riveted on the medical form in front of him. It spoke a language he recognised and understood: broken radius, scaphoid fracture of the wrist, lacerations of the torso. Nothing a Curaga -- and a couple days avoiding the training centre -- couldn’t fix.
“Just another average day in the life of a Balamb cadet,” he said, flipping the page to its other side and double-checking the signatures. Noah had left a taunting little doodle in the margins. Typical.
“They ought to install a revolving door in the infirmary, the way I’m in and out of this place. So don’t worry about this--” He rapped the cast on his arm, and nearly managed to suppress the small spasm of pain that flickered across his face. “--it’s no big deal. It’ll be healed up soon. How about you? Did the damsel escape unscathed? Did the hero do his job?”
Seifer had writhed his way into sitting upright, and now let the clipboard fall against his knee. And there it was, that familiar glimpse of cheekiness in the corner of his mouth and the fond familiarity with which he addressed her. The princess. She wasn’t one, not really, but the nickname had stuck. And it fit. And somewhere, he felt that hollow little pang of having her back, here, beside him, flopped in a seat in Balamb Garden as if nothing had ever happened, as if she’d always been here. It was strange: cognitive dissonance, seeing Rinoa where she technically didn’t belong, in a space he hadn’t carved out for her just yet.
“I’m going to worry anyway, you know,” she said primly, a pout already making itself known. Seifer was a force in and of himself, and she would be the first to admit that it was difficult for her to believe that he could even be touched, much less by the weapon of a foe. But the scar across his face, the various bandages, the memory of him buckled over: all served to remind Rinoa that, whatever he had been to her, Seifer was as breakable as she.
“As for the damsel, silly thing, she’s fine.” There were more than a few bruises blooming across the planes of her pale skin--hardly cause for concern. Delicate though she may be, she was still a cadet where it counted. Injuries could be handled with a stiff upper lip, duties accomplished without a word of protest. It was, of course, duty in itself that had called her to Balamb, but now was hardly a fitting time to ponder or address her true mission.
Back to flirtation. That was always easy ground to tread. “Her hero was quite adequate,” she teased, smiling, mirroring his cheekiness tit for tat. “Got a little banged up in the end, but what can you do? Think he’ll be in here for much longer?”
“‘Adequate’. So points for style, I guess, if not a perfect wound record.” He laughed, and it came as a gravelly bark through his lips. “And he’s determined to not be in this bed for one-- second-- more--” Setting the clipboard onto the adjacent table, Seifer swung out from under the sheets. Thank Hyne they hadn’t put him in an actual infirmary robe; the injuries were nowhere near bad enough for that and Noah had already seen his bare ass more times than he was, strictly speaking, comfortable with. And he didn’t want that to be the grand-standing vision greeting Rinoa. So thankfully, he seemed to be dressed in loose-fitting black yoga pants and a white wifebeater. One hand fumbled at his neck, but his movement stilled once he found the reassuring pair of dog tags.
“Your dashing hero wants to go for a walk. You should indulge him.” Bare toes wiggling on the tile, Seifer rose to his feet with a slight wince. He scratched at his arm.
She let her eyes trail across his body for a quick moment before reacting. A slim, pale hand shot out to his shoulder, gently pushing in the direction of the bed.
“You shouldn’t be getting up yet!” she chastised, playful but firm. “Think of all the things that could happen to you.”
“Oh, yeah, all the dangerous things lurking in the medical bay. Something worse than the airship-sized dragon throwing me across the stadium, you mean?” Seifer smirked through the wry humour, but the man’s lungs hitched as he shifted his weight, his hand momentarily tightening on the edge of the bed. And then he was moving, one arm sidling around Rinoa’s waist for balance, and off they went -- hobbling down the halls for a tour of the campus, for stretching his legs, for a breath of fresh air.
His pace straightened as they moved, turning less wobbly and more footsure. His back straightened. Seifer’s arm fit against hers like a jigsaw piece, the crook of his elbow offered gentleman-like to her pale hands. Leaning against Rinoa felt familiar. She was back, yes, and it would be different and new, but she was still an old echo of his past. A shade come waltzing out of his memory.
But then there was still that interminable itch, that sensation that there was something he’d forgotten, the pins and needles across his arm where a sorceress’ nailmarks still lingered unhealed.