The Hollow

Fall of a Sparrow

Till Sleeping Voices Wake Us

Balamb Garden
1 BLC
Two and Three-quarter Years to the Present

Impassive violet eyes met his own stern glare from beneath the rim of a cowboy hat.

It sounds funny, but at the time it wasn’t.

Cid was blathering on about their new mission, which was utterly pointless since they’d been given briefing folders; Squall did hate it when old people droned on and on with no apparent purpose. So he stared at their new companion instead.

Companion. He hated that word. As though their tiny company of recent graduates (fresh meat, the more experienced SeeDs called them) socialized or chatted or had bonded over adventure. He didn’t have companions.

The cowboy was tall, maybe as tall as Seifer, and so would hold the advantage in hand-to-hand. He was a sharpshooter, though, so it was possible that he’s never studied fighting the way that Squall had. He was the peculiar faded golden color of a tan that hadn’t seen the sun in awhile. His eyes were violet.

Okay, so that part bore repeating.

Squall fought the urge to fidget as the cowboy (Irvine, Shiva reminded him) sauntered over to join their neat little row. Somehow that saunter looked familiar. Like a remnant of a dream, and yet very like something he saw every day ... Seifer!

And there was a definite resemblance between the two; not physically, but in that confident stride, the fuck-you set of the shoulders, the gleaming parti-colored eyes. Squall scowled, and broke their shared glare as the cowboy stepped into their line.

Next to him, Rinoa was practically panting. Selphie was drooling. Only Quistis seemed unmoved, but then she’d always been compared to an iceberg. The Ice Queen and her Prince. That was him. He hunched a shoulder, turned his head away from the cowboy (Irvine) and sighed.

A lost memory niggled. A synapse fired, sputtered, died. Nothing.

" ... Squall?"

In the monotone lecture sounded his name; his head came up, though his expression didn’t change. Cid was staring at him. He shrugged.

"So you understand your objectives?" Cid probed, looking faintly miffed. Squall suppressed a second shrug.

"Whatever," he said quietly, making no attempt to apologize. As if he’d ever wanted this.

"Yes, sir!" Selphie chirped quickly, bringing one hand to her brow in a cheerful salute. The others murmured agreement, the cowboy (Irvine) making an odd motion with his right hand that looked vaguely ritualistic.

"Very well," Cid said, false heartiness showing in his clasped hands and faintly-astonished eyes. "Good bye, my children, and good luck."

Everyone chorused 'thank you', except for Squall, who simply turned to leave.

He could hear someone, Selphie perhaps, yelling after him in distinctive, whiny tones.

Whatever.

He didn’t need this. Companions.

Companions?

Fuck that. He was the Lionheart.

He always worked alone.

Wait for the Hunger to Come

Deep Sea Research Facility
1 BLC
Two and Three-quarter Years to the Present

He floated in an endless sea of darkness, cocooned in something so unchangeable it didn’t acknowledge time. He was content; he was conscious of being content.

Everything was as it should be.

He was asleep and dreaming.

He was floating naked in the womb.

He was--

Dead.

Even the realization brought no disturbance to the void. He floated. Perhaps time passed. He neither knew nor cared. This was all. This was everything. This was peace.

He knew peace.

Perhaps time passed.

Then a sudden light pierced that realm of shadow. He turned away, his first voluntary movement, but the light expanded, grew stronger, cast shadows and harsh relief in his darkling void, dragging him back into life. Pain. Light.

It bathed him in glory and hell, a shaft of light drifting feathers like lumined dust-motes on a summer’s afternoon, in a Fira-spell sharp coaxing into life. Full-life. Rare stuff, expensive. They must be doing poorly.

He dragged himself up and out of sleeping death, climbing onto shaky legs with barely a missed beat. All you can do is hope some stroke of luck keeps you alive long enough to kill the fucking beast.

Which battle is this again?

He shook his head to clear it, fending off a blow and darting out to counter Ultima Weapon’s massive sword while riffling through his spells for something useful. Multitasking was absolutely vital in this line of work.

Lionheart connected with armored flesh on the downward swing, gouging a furrow that spattered his leathers with blood. The beast roared, a hell-damned shriek, and reared back as Irvine cast Ultima and Zell disappeared, making way for Quezacotl. Squall darted back into the protective field, readying a Curaga for the inevitable injury.

Then the Thunder god took his place on this plane, shivering him into a place of safety. A place remarkably familiar. A place he visited every time he let his guard down.

The battle was remote for the moment. Distant. For these few seconds he was the only person in existence. Had he been corporeal, he would have fallen to the ground and curled up in a ball of agony. Here, the pain was just as distant as the lightning crackling the flesh of a lesser god. A shadow. Waiting.

He’d been cleaved by a sword longer than his own body. He’d been flung into immediate blackness unrelieved by any mockery of an afterlife. He’d known peace. And then he’d been dragged back into life. Oh, and he’d been fully healed with magic.

Magic heals. It does. It knits together torn flesh, reweaves sinews, pieces together splintered bone. In fact, the only thing it can’t do is replace lost blood, or fully heal a head injury. Even Dr. Kadowaki wasn’t sure why neurological damage interfered with the magic. Hyne, even a severed spinal cord bridged the gap with no complaint. But all the forcing together of synapses in the world couldn’t put things exactly right.

This wasn’t a head injury. He’d get over it, eventually. So what if the mind remembers pain far longer than the muscles? Phantom pain. Nothing he couldn’t work through. Nothing he hadn’t worked through a thousand times before.

But was it so wrong? To want to heal of a piece, slowly, the way everyone else does? To want something to stop the pain? Is that so wrong?

And back! The ground hummed with residual electricity; it shivered up his heels to his spine as he wavered back onto the cavern floor. Ultima Weapon was sore hurt, but Zell had been laid out by another swipe of that sword. Squall cast his Curaga, trusting Irvine to hit the beast with something while he was occupied.

But nothing happened. Zell staggered to his feet, and was brought down instantly by a shrilling blast of light. Squall hit him with a Phoenix Down, desperate now, only to see the Martial Artist waver beneath a simple stroke of that fucking sword. And Full-life, damn the cost, cast while looking over his shoulder for the smiling cowboy.

Irvine was down.

Ultima Weapon made a sudden move as if to cast another lance of light; Zell screamed something unintelligible, and called Quezacotl once again as Squall threw a Full-life at Irvine, barely breathing until it took effect.

Irvine rolled to his feet just as the Light took Quezacotl; the Guardian Force took the death blow for Zell, dropping him back into the fight, bereft.

One down.

Shiva rustled at the back of his mind; Irvine cast an Ultima spell, drawn from the beast itself, and Squall called his Ice goddess in a rush of glacier wind.

Back into the void he went, as she came instantly to his call, mind still more on Zell’s safety than on the battle; losing a Guardian Force, even temporarily, did something to one’s mind. It hurt.

Shiva conjured her northern domain; the beast screamed, but Squall kept his eye on Zell as they shimmered back into the cavern. Irvine cast something behind him, and Zell gave him a grinning thumbs up. Squall turned back to the beast, counting on the ice to have slowed it, and--

The sword tore into his side. It tore through his leathers like paper, split muscle, splintered ribs, crushed organs, and hurled him to his knees. He could hear screaming. It was not his own. He climbed to his feet, waving Irvine away when the cowboy would have cast a healing spell; he was waiting.

He darted forward on feet that felt like lead but moved with all his usual power and grace; his body was not trained to acknowledge injury. He swung a crippled blow that nevertheless landed true. Lionheart shattered a canine, ripped a furrow in snarling lips. He fell back, holding his elbows close in to protect his side.

Ultima Weapon was silent. The three friends exchanged one nervous glance. It was all they had time for. In the ominous vacuum, a small dot appeared, like an expanding hole in midair.

"It’s casting Gravija!" Irvine yelled, throwing up a Protect at the last moment, forgetting that it would do little against a magical attack. The hole became a tunnel, somehow concave in shape; it bowed outward with a sound like the warping of Balamb’s supports in midwinter, grew again in diameter, and was suddenly filled with a multitude of lights like a contained galaxy.

Squall panted, readied Shiva, and it hit him.

He’d been to space. He’d floated helpless through a vacuum that threatened to destroy him at the least mistake. He’d lived with the awareness that the smallest imperfection in his helmet or suit could result in explosive decompression. He’d been informed of the properties of vacuum in graphic detail, told with gleaming eyes of oxygen boiled from the blood like bubbles to the surface of the ocean.

He’d never imagined that he’d find out exactly how that felt.

Pain ripped through him; he’d never been crushed into roughly the diameter of a Chocobo egg, but this was definitely a similar sensation. It rolled through him, compressing every fiber into nothing so that they sprang back tangled and worn with the spell’s passing. He shook it off, called Shiva again, and disappeared into the painless black.

If only ever allowed to remain.

Shiva screamed, somewhere in his head, down in the hippocampus or outward in the cortex where his long term memory should be. He was dumped back into reality, side blazing, Guardian dead. Irvine called Pandemona, and Squall took another hit from that sword, just before the beast was torn through with a whirlwind. He almost went down, riding out Irvine’s summoning in a cloud of pain that penetrated even the protective plane.

When he returned, Zell was in the midst of a Meltdown; their first action, after drawing the coveted GF, had been the casting of this spell, but its effects had apparently worn off. The beast roared, and glowed briefly, and Squall felt it come upon him.

His Limit Break.

The pain vanished, and he lunged forward, slashing into flesh once, and again, and again, six times all told; he darted back , more alert than he’d been in days, feeling the energy crest beneath his breastbone and he channeled it straight up into the atmosphere, a shattering beam of light that he drew forward into the beast, dividing it with its own favored weapon.

The energy left him with the final blow; he staggered, and readied a Thundaga as Zell hit him with a healing spell that he honestly didn’t want. He straightened up, eyes still fixed on the beast, and it ... Was glowing again. Irvine paused while casting Ultima, letting the spell fizzle to nothing as the beast staggered,

moaned,

and flew apart.

Death was almost always a surprise.

The concussion flung him to the ground; he struck his barely-healed ribs, and nearly passed out as the dying beast tore itself to pieces somewhere over his head. The grim sight was tinted red. Then everything was silent.

The world was fuzzy and indistinct for a time; he was distantly aware of Irvine staggering to his feet. Zell wasn’t moving, and Irvine went to him first. The bright flare of a Curaga caused Squall to squint and tilt his head to the side; even that brief effort left him drained.

Everything was quiet, mostly.

There was something with him. Inside his head.

Irvine sauntered over, Zell in tow; both had been wounded, the blood

blood

streaking their clothes was proof enough, even without the languor of usually-energetic strides. But they were healed now.

The blood.

Various somethings jostled about for room inside his tattered cortex, like the faint rustlings of a distant wind.

The blood.

Irvine’s hand on his brow redirected his attention to his companions; he glared up with glazed eyes, pupils dilated so that Irvine was confronted with just a thin rim of silvered blue. The color of the ocean riding level beneath a full moon.

Irvine smiled down at him. Squall was at quite a loss as to why, but managed to tilt the corner of his mouth in reply. Irvine raised a chestnut brow, said something, and Squall was suddenly bathed in siren-song blue.

The Curaga arced through him, arched his back in a painful bow, thumped his head against the ground; then it was over, his wounds knit to ragdoll health, and he slumped bonelessly down. Irvine was grinning at him faintly. Squall just glared up at him and breathed.

"You have him, right?" Irvine asked, holding out one hand; the tipped gloves were bloody, but the exposed pads of his fingers were clean. Squall had time to wonder about this detail as he took the lean hand and levered himself to his feet.

Time was limping behind him.

"She," he said absently, turning the hand over in his grip to examine the clean stripe of leather where the rifle grip had blocked any blood. "Her name is Eden."

"Okay," Irvine said, sounding somewhat bemused as he stared down at the Commander’s blood-matted hair. Squall had still not relinquished the cowboy’s hand, and was now staring intently at the blood itself, which was already gumming to black in the fine grain of the leather. Squall raised the hand and ducked his head, nearing the bloodied hand with the delicacy of a cat. Irvine jerked, then stilled. "You okay, Squall?"

"Hmm?" Squall’s head came up; his eyes focused on Irvine, pinning for a moment before steadying into a swirl of blue, and he dropped the blood-soaked hand. His tongue teased from the corner of his mouth, wetting his lips as he stared up at Irvine from beneath a jagged fringe of bloodied bangs. "Have we finished?"

"Hey, Squall, did you hit your head or something?" Zell asked from a few feet away, crackling a concerned energy even from the distance. Squall grimaced, losing the faintly wistful expression and rubbing at his scar with his gloved fingers. The leather left a smear of blood, and Irvine itched to attack Squall with spit and cloth. Squall was glaring at him.

"Yes, sir, Commander, sir?" Irvine asked innocently, removing his battered hat and jerking into "at attention". Squall rolled his eyes.

"I said, we’re leaving," Squall repeated, obviously annoyed at the necessity as he led the way to the foot of the mountainous walkway they had descended with such difficulty. Squall strode forward with something like his usual energy, hips working liquidly beneath black leather. Irvine stared after him for a moment.

Something wasn’t right.

"Hey, Zell," Irvine drawled, snagging the martial artist as he passed and throwing one long arm around his shoulders. "D’ya think you could talk to Diablos about Enc-None, possibly?" he asked with a winning smile.

"I suppose," Zell said doubtfully. "But why? We just kicked the most powerful ass on the planet!"

"And that’s why Squally-boy doesn’t need to be tiring himself on the odd Ruby Dragon or Iron Giant, get me?" Irvine said quietly, keeping a careful eye on Squall’s rigid back.

"Oh," Zell nodded with something of a knowing air. "I get it. Sure, Irvine. No problem."

If Squall retained any suspicions about their quiet hike to sea level, he didn’t mention them.

Somehow, the way down hadn’t seemed quite so long as the way up; Irvine just stared wordlessly at the destruction left in their wake, the torn steel girders and sheet metal ripped and melted into slag. Ahead of him, Squall’s shoulders were tight, his neck bowed slightly, his steps short and quick. He seemed almost to be arguing with himself. Zell trudged somewhere behind Irvine, his energy spent on a brief shadobox at their first sign of sunlight some levels down.

Squall paused for a half-second, shook his head, and moved on.

Irvine would have missed the moment if he hadn’t been watching Squall so closely.

Ahead of him, Squall’s shoulders were tense beneath worn leather, ready to draw Lionheart at any moment, practically humming with energy. His stride was long, his head up, his attention focused on the trail. All was as usual. That should have been reassuring. Irvine bit back an expletive, cutting his lip in the process.

Squall had just junctioned the new beastie.

"Damnit, Squall," Irvine murmured to himself. "We agreed to wait." They were supposed to wait, at least until hitting the surface, at least until they could discuss who would junction the most powerful Guardian Force on the planet.

If this had been Seifer, Irvine would have just assumed that he’d taken the GF for his own profit, shrugged knowingly, and then thought little of it. But this was Squall ...

Irvine couldn’t shake the thought that somehow, Squall hadn’t exactly chosen to complete that junction.

A/N Chapter title taken from Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 2. First subtitle taken from T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the second from "Catapult" by the Counting Crows.