Balamb Blues | Through Myself and Back Again

I bought him flowers.

It was all I could think to do.

And anyway, it went together, right? Hospitals and flowers. Yeah.

We stayed the night with Ma Dincht, to save us the drive. She was just getting up for the day when we stumbled blind into her doorstep. I would’ve slept anywhere, on the back of a running Chocobo, anywhere at all, but she gave me her own bed. Zell staggered upstairs. I slept till nearly five, and when I left to track down a get-well bouquet Zell was still snoring.

I wasn’t even sure of Squall’s favorite flower. Probably something like a rose, except Rinoa loved roses. So no use in going there.

The florist was really very helpful. She was a pert little thing, maybe Selphie’s height, if that, with bright pink hair that, strangely enough, complimented her milk-pale complexion. She recommended spider lilies, yellow, long-stemmed. I didn’t even have a vase.

I dithered for about twenty minutes, smelling lilacs and irises and fingering the lilies. I decided on gladiolas at seven twenty, threw cash on the counter, and ran for the door. I couldn’t be late, not for this! The vase was heavy, water sloshed as I ran, and all I could think was why in hell did they have to expand Balamb to the west? Why not north? Make it wider instead of longer, instead of stretching out along the train tracks like some river-town. It was a long walk.

BMHI is this low, ugly concrete and Plexi-glass compound, surrounded by more wire fences than a prison and two depressingly tiny parking lots. Did no one ever visit? Even the trees were drooping and sad with neglect against the sheer rigidity of the too-modern sprawl. Ironically enough, it squatted beside the shiny new Loire Children’s Hospital. Squall’s father had always had a soft spot for children. Just not his own.

Zell was no where to be found, but as I stood panting in the empty lot, flowers clutched in one hand, hat in the other to fan myself, he trotted around the north corner at battle-speed.

He was carrying a back pack, and slowed to a stumbling walk when he saw me.

"Flowers," I explained when he came to a stop, holding up the bouquet like an offering or a shield.

"I didn’t know," he panted. "What Squall might want. So I brought some of my old stuffed toys."

I raised one brow. Thinking, Squall and stuffed animals? It didn’t seem to fit, but looking at that glass building, I just nodded. Gestured to the complex.

"Shall we?" I prompted. He remained still for a moment, catching his breath.

"Should we call someone?" he asked, looking uncertain.

"After," I said. "We should probably ask him if he wants anyone else to know. He might care."

"True enough," he chuckled weakly, and we started for the stairs.

Two sections of chain link fence funneled us to a concrete and steel set of stairs, the kind that run free-standing; I could see a miserable square of dimly-lit green beyond it through the slats between steps. The hall ran on behind the stairs, but all the doors visible from our position said things like "Door locked for the patients’ protection", or "Please enter upstairs". So we went up the stairs.

I was silent, and trudged to concrete slats at a time. Zell hummed nervously to himself, and bounded up with a remnant of his usual energy. The back pack bounced with his strides, hitting his back with a hollow, nylon sound.

The stairs left us after only a flight, and we were dumped onto an elevated concrete walkway. Not to keep emphasizing the concrete, but it was the really horrible kind, pebbly with "real" stones like some tragically doomed attempt at decorative functionality. Yuck. The walkway mostly surrounded a rectangle of open air that looked down on the grassy courtyard. It was fenced around, of course, but only to waist height, and I got the feeling that patients maybe weren’t let outside unsupervised.

Blank windows stared down at us from directly above and across the way. We weren’t sure of Squall’s exact location, but all my badgering
at the Med had gotten me a more general area to begin the search: East Wing 4. It was like a spell, an incantation. East Wing 4. It didn’t really mean anything to me, but was repeated obsessively in my head as we approached the guarded and locked glass doors. The walls were glass, windows on all sides, so you could see straight through the lobby to the lonely slice of meadow on the other side of the building, fenced as it was.

There was a guard sitting at a small card table just inside the doors. I just stared at him for a long moment, but Zell made a little waving motion, and he hit a button like a remote car alarm or garage door closer. Something buzzed loudly, and one of the doors popped open about an inch. I grabbed the handle before it could close again, and slipped inside.

A group of resident doctors, young and chattering and apparently freed from their shift, brushed past us through the same door. They had keycards, and asked the guard for nothing. We approached his table slowly, Zell casting curious glances to a glassed-in reception desk.

"Do we have to sign in?" Zell guessed, loudly enough for the guard to overhear. He nodded, overweight and grizzled, and nudged a clipboard forward across the small table.

"Patient’s name, your name," he said boredly, pointing to each row in turn as he handed Zell a cheap pen. Zell scrawled Squall’s name quickly,
then his own, and handed the pen over to me. I looked down at what Zell had written, and felt sick for a moment.

The guard directed us over to the reception desk with a careless wave of one hand. We walked around the three free-standing metal detectors,
not through them, but he didn’t seem to notice. The woman behind the glass was on the phone and fiddling with a switchboard; from what I could hear she was locating a doctor for someone who sounded exceedingly pissed off.

There was a large clock on the wall behind her, with visiting hours posted prominently beside it. The elevators, across from the reception desk, also boasted another such sign, as well as a variety of notices involving who could ride the elevator and when. Most of the prohibitions referred to patients and their guests.

Zell was tapping impatiently at the glass shielding her from us, and I began calculating an escape plan. The walls were beige. The people were ignoring me. I’d been here for five minutes and I was already getting twitchy. Squall must be out of his mind by now! The minute hand eased forward again, and I blatantly adjusted my gun, very aware that our single visiting hour was slipping by rapidly.

"No weapons allowed," a voice said behind me. It was the guard. Apparently he was capable of moving on his own after all. "No weapons, pens, pencils, compasses, glass, flowers, or playing cards."

"Flowers?" Zell asked incredulously. "Why can’t he have flowers?"

"We’ve had patients eat them before," the guard said.

"Look, Squall is not going to try to eat these flowers," I countered, glaring at the man. It was almost funny, and I had to tamp down a bubble of hysterical laughter.

"Other patients might," he shrugged.

"Okay, one, why would these patients have access to his things, and two, who cares?" I asked, gesturing wildly with my free arm as the anger built. "Flowers are non-toxic, who really cares?"

"Doctors orders," he said, his voice invoking ritual rather than one specific possessive. No one had ordered this. It was custom. And custom is something that can’t really be argued with. Not successfully, anyway. Not in just the few minutes we had.

I looked down at the flowers in my hand, at the glass vase I’d bought not an hour before, at Exeter’s strap across my chest, and grinned sickly.

"What else can’t he have?" I asked. My voice sounded dead.

"The receptionist has a list," the guard said, apparently bored to tears and wanting only to get back to his station. "I’m only supposed to stop weapons and purses."

"Right," I said, feeling numb. I unstrapped Exeter’s sheath, setting down the flowers to get the knives out of my boots.

I didn’t remove everything. I’m not that recovered from the war.

He took my pile of weaponry back to his card table, shaking his head. Zell’s gloved hands went unnoticed, and the guard hadn’t actually searched me, so neither of us were helpless. That was something, anyway.

The receptionist finally hung up the phone, and we pounced.

"Patient’s name?" she asked, almost managing to sound interested.

"Squall Leonheart," Zell said, leaning forward to speak into the window. I wanted to applaud his discretion, so rare in the martial artist, but I had the sick feeling this little secret wouldn’t stay hidden for long.

"Listen, the guard said we can’t take flowers up," I began, leaning in with my most charming non-sexual smile. "Could you maybe leave them at a nurse’s station or someplace where he could see them?"

She looked up from the box of index cards she’d been rifling through, staring at the flower arrangement like she’d never seen such a thing.

"I’ll have to ask his doctor," she said, pulling out two cards and placing them on the counter along with two bright green visitor’s passes. They were laminated, and had little alligator-teeth clamps.

"Could you do that?" I prompted, eyes glittering with what she probably thought was gratitude. It wasn’t.

"We have some other things for him," Zell added, heaving his backpack up onto the counter. "Can we take this up?"

"No, but we can give him the contents," she said, as though the scene had been memorized by rote long ago. "Provided they are approved by his doctor."

"It’s just some stuffed animals and a paperback I thought he might like," Zell said, almost whining. I was getting sick of these rules, too.

"I can’t let him have the back pack," she repeated, pulling out another clipboard from the pile of paperwork scattered across her desk. I clipped my visitor’s pass to my collar, where it stuck out jauntily. "The stuffed animals can probably go up, and maybe the book. What all do you have in there?" she continued, pen poised to record our answer.

"Why?" I asked, probably sounding as cranky as I felt. Our hour was slipping away.

"We keep records of the patient’s possessions so that they can be returned," she explained, again from routine.

"Fine," Zell said. "Two stuffed animals and three books, one back pack, and a vase with flowers, okay?"

"You understand the vase can’t go up," she said as she wrote. She was wearing scrubs, the ubiquitous hospital uniform. Was she a nurse?

"Yes, yes, we understand that," Zell said impatiently. "But you’re going to ask?"

"Sure, honey, I’ll check on that for you first thing in the morning," she said absently, working the vase through the large square in her protective window. She set the flowers on a file cabinet, saying absently that they sure smelled nice, and pulled out a roll of masking tape. "I’ll label these for you if you want to go on up," she said, already marking the backpack with tape and pen.

"Where is he?" Zell asked, looking blankly at his card. I looked down at mine. The incantation was scrawled beneath Squall’s name in abbreviated form: E-4.

"Just take those elevators, honey," the receptionist pointed from behind us. I nodded, glancing at the clock. Nearly eight. It had seemed to take longer.

On a guess I hit the button for the fourth floor. The elevator was slow, and large, and smelled of a dangerous musk. It hit me then: this wasn’t a hospital.

There was no smell of disinfectant, no flowers allowed in the rooms, no cheerful nurses with bright smiles and loving hearts to turn down bed sheets and administer morphine. This was no hospital.

This was something far more frightening.

The elevator groaned to a halt, and we exited into a small yellow room with doors in each of its other three walls. Pierced on all sides, like a heart. The door across from the elevators looked like it had been painted shut, like a rarely-used window sill. The doors to our left were labeled with a large ‘W’, the doors to our right with a large ‘E’. Each door had a sign over a small buzzer that said "Ring for admittance", but there were two other people in this small yellow room.

One was visiting, and the second an employee; they’d just emerged from ‘W’, and she turned from locking the door with a frown, saying "He’s on East, you should have said that before," and leading the visitor across to the doors marked ‘E’.

We followed, flashed the little card and gained admittance to hell.

Okay, it wasn’t all that bad, but it was still depressing. Just a long, bare room, with scattered wooden furniture and sad, thinly-padded couches, one TV on a rolling cart, and a glassed-in nurse’s station in the northeast corner, by another set of doors. There was also a set at the opposite end, beneath another large clock.

The opposite wall was actually another bank of floor to ceiling windows, these wired and caged and shuttered, utterly blocked from the night. A number of employees sat at one long table, ignoring us, which was amusing as they were apparently their as security. A few patients were huddled with visitors at the other end of the long room.

The woman who had, perhaps unintentionally, given us entrance finally came to see what we needed. I just held up my card mutely, and Zell said, "Squall Leonheart, that’s L-E-O-N-H-E-A-R-T, in E-4."

"Right," she said, grinning briefly. "The ‘whatever’ man," she continued, before waving us to a little couch across from the security-stifled windows and heading for the doors at the north end of the room, by the nurse’s station. There was a man behind the glass. She said something to him as we moved to sit down, and he buzzed her through.

Then we waited.

My knee was jigging nervously. My gut was churning. I’d felt less anxious preparing to kill the woman who’d raised me, raised us all.

Zell was uncharacteristically silent, though his fists were clenched and his teeth apparently grinding together. I had a feeling the silence wouldn’t last very long.

A wail echoed down the room. My head whipped around, hat caught by reflex, and I caught sight of an older woman rocking back and forth in the arms of another woman who could’ve been her sister. I blinked. Mental hospitals were co-ed? Hmph.

It’s surprising how quickly you become numb.

I felt Zell giving me a look, so I turned to face his gaze, hot and hungry and ready to kill.

Oh yes. Zell was pissed, and likely to raise hell once we’d left. At least he knew better than to upset Squall.

Speaking of, the doors opened. I jumped to my feet, caught sight of the nurse who’d let us in and a slimmer, shorter dark-haired figure. It slammed into my gut, the knowledge of just how small Squall really is. We think of him as larger than life, because usually he seems it. I guess all masks shatter under enough pressure.

My heart was fluttering. I saw his head come up, and he caught sight of us over the nurse’s broad shoulder. Zell was on his feet beside me, bobbing impatiently so that his blond crest resembled a walking chocobo.

Squall grinned.

My heart fell to my feet, below my feet, and yet spiraled up with fear and a delirious joy of reunion. I strained forward on my toes, feeling unable to move as the nurse moved to the side and he came clearly into view. Zell stepped forward, and this broke my paralysis as I stepped up with him, striding to meet our imprisoned Commander who was grinning at us like we were water and he was dying of thirst and we met him halfway--

--and he fell into Zell’s arms and caught tthe back of my neck in his hug, bowing me down to shelter his back and wrap and arm around his waist.

He was crying softly, and still smiling.

"You came," he said, a broken man. "You came."

A/N Chapter title taken from "Color Blind" by the Counting Crows.