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One (Last) Chance	By : RotSeele Category: Final Fantasy VIII > Yaoi - Male/Male > Seifer/Squall Views: 3719 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy 8. I do not make any money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thirty-Six - Seifer POV

We got moving again a little while later, this time heading back down to the prison cells to pick up another key. Squall had a faintly amused smile on his face as he picked it up out of the water, so it wasn’t hard to figure out how it got down here. He led us to the next door, and the next fight. This one was the hardest we had faced by far, but Squall continued to handle it with expert grace. He cast the Meltdown spell, since I still refused to let him have the Guardian Forces back, and launched into the first attack on the beast. I backed him up, with Rinoa supporting us, but just when I thought the battle was over, the second phase began. It was a difficult fight, even with a majority of our abilities unlocked. When the Gargantua finally expired, I saw Squall crouch down with his head bowed, his chest heaving as he fought for breath. He wasn’t looking at me. He was allowing me to choose which of our remaining abilities we took. The choice was simple - draw or the demons. Eventually, I’d have to have Carbuncle back in my head, but I was enjoying the solitary nature of my own thoughts.
I was enjoying the ability to be able to think without having someone make a comment on them. I couldn’t understand how Squall could deal with it, especially since he kept the more powerful demons in his mind. What was it like living with Shiva? Did she favor the Ice Prince and therefore left him alone? Or was she partly to blame for his icy personality?
I frowned as I considered that line of thought. I guess if Squall was Shiva, then I was a perfect match with Ifrit. We were perfect opposites, just as Shiva and Ifrit were. Maybe that was why, some times, we got along just fine, and other times we got on each other’s nerves.
I wondered then if it wasn’t just me Squall was worried about, as far as the GFs went, but the fight with Ultimecia as well. He never told me how he had beat her the first time, only that he had, and then he’d ended up wandering around this wasteland within the Time Compression until he’d ended up back at the beginning. I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d forgotten how he’d fought and defeated Ultimecia, or if he wasn’t sure that the same tactics would work the same way now. I thought about asking him, but I doubted he’d tell me. I knew how Squall worked. He’d told me everything because I didn’t leave him much of a choice. I knew he hadn’t given me all the details, mostly on the things he didn’t think were important or the things he didn’t want me to inadvertently change, and I couldn’t really blame him for that.
I couldn’t blame him for wanting to protect me.
I couldn’t blame him for fighting to ensure my safety.
But, I guess I kinda did.
The way he watched me sometimes grated on my nerves. It made me feel like he thought I was somehow less. That I couldn’t fight Ultimecia off if she decided to invade my head again, without the protection of Carbuncle. I mean, when she tried before, I’d nearly been driven to my knees trying to withstand her while Carbuncle fought his furry little ass off. If I hadn’t had him then, I doubted I’d have been able to survive it.
Unbidden I remembered the words he’d uttered back in the portrait room - In the Garden Sleeps the Messenger - and focused on the memory of his expression as he’d said it. Those words bothered him. There was a message in them, one he hadn’t liked. I liked to think I spoke Squall-ese, but sometimes I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking, even if the emotions were plain on his face or in his eyes. We were getting closer to the end, and we all were getting tenser.
I chose to unlock the GFs, figuring I’d get an answer one way or another.
I felt them return to me like whispers in my ear. Ifrit, Carbuncle, Diablos, they all returned to me, although I couldn’t feel Carbuncle’s protective shield around my mind anymore. I looked at Squall and found him smiling gently, his gaze unfocused. He was probably talking to the demons that he’d junctioned with, although how he could smile like that with them, I didn’t know. Then he glanced at me, and his eyes darkened slightly.
“Yeah,” I said, waving my hand toward my head, “they’re back.”
Oh, it was awful. Carbuncle said, his little furry butt bouncing around inside my head. All we were able to do was watch. It was terrible!
Yeah, agreed Ifrit, though his tone was far more sarcastic, completely terrible. For once we get to relax and just watch everything happen without having to lift a finger to help. It was almost like a vacation!
Carbuncle bounced and turned to glower at Ifrit. I had a job to do. Unlike someone else.
I somehow stopped myself from snickering. Ifrit’s expression became affronted and a growl escaped the fire GF. I swear, Ifrit would’ve strangled Carbuncle if he thought he could reach him before Diablos got in between. I saw him glance toward the bat-like GF, gauging the distance, then decided to apparently let it go, though he pointed a claw at Carbuncle and said, If you weren’t so useful, fuzzball, I’d tear you limb from limb.
Carbuncle stuck his little pink tongue out at Ifrit and quickly got out of reach. Then he looked at me. I’m sorry Seifer. I can’t put shields up around your mind anymore.
Don’t worry about it. I replied. I glanced at Squall, noticing how he wasn’t looking at me anymore. His gaze seemed distant, and I realized he was probably still talking to his own demons. Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. You did a good job.
Carbuncle preened at my praise and twitched his tail back and forth. He gave a smug look to Ifrit, who only rolled his eyes and pointedly turned his back to the little green fuzzball. I drew my attention away from them and focused on Squall, who seemed to be coming out of his own dazed state. His stormy eyes flicked toward me, but whatever question he wanted to ask me he apparently decided wasn’t worth putting into voice. I was pretty sure he knew there was nothing Carbuncle could do now for me; Squall’s force-junction hadn’t put Carbuncle under my control. Rather, he’d remained under Squall’s command, just living in my mind and forming shields around it so Ultimecia couldn’t control me. Now Carbuncle was naturally junctioned to me, and his reflect shields would only protect us from magical attacks. I was on my own if Ultimecia decided to toy with my thoughts.
I glanced at Rinoa. Well. Maybe not totally alone.
Of course, I hoped Ultimecia was too caught up in her victory to think about trying to turn me against Squall again. I hoped Rinoa wouldn’t have to put her sorceress skills to the test in order to keep me as one of her knights.
“Come on.” Squall said. He started moving, and Rinoa and I fell into step behind him. We crossed through the castle, heading down hallways and through rooms, and fighting little things that came out of the woodwork to try and eat our faces. I noticed that Squall was starting to hold back during the fights, conserving his strength for when he’d need it the most. For him to start doing that meant only one thing: we were getting close to the end.
We met back up with the others in a beautiful courtyard filled with an empty fountain. They looked a little worse for the wear, so Squall allowed us to take a few minutes to rest and heal. He stood off by himself, his head tilted back, staring up toward a giant clocktower. I couldn’t see his face, so I couldn’t read his expression, but I knew from the tenseness of his body that in just a few moments, we would be facing the sorceress who wanted to kill us all and have the world all to herself.
I approached Squall, purposefully letting my footsteps make noise to let him know I was coming. I saw him release the necklace he wore around his throat and drop his hand to his side before he turned to face me. His expression was carefully neutral. I glanced at his Griever pendant, then back at his face.
“Worried?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You’re a bad liar, Leonhart.”
He glowered at me.
I turned my gaze up toward the clocktower. “She’s up there, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s almost over, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the first thing you want to do when we get back?”
Squall’s lips twitched. “Vacation.”
I grinned. “Yeah, me too. We could pick up where we left off on the beach.”
His cheeks colored slightly and he looked away from me, despite the slight smile that curled the edges of his lips. “I’d like that.”
I came closer to him until I was standing right beside him. “Only we won’t do it in the secret place. Hyne knows someone’s bound to walk in on us there. Where would you like to go? You’ve been all over the damn world. Where was your favorite spot?”
Squall was silent for a while. His head tilted to one side in thought, and a small smile appeared on his face. He shrugged. “Nowhere in particular.”
“Oh, come on, Ice Prince. There’s gotta be somewhere.”
His smile became a little softer. “Winhill.” he said at last.
I blinked, instantly caught off guard. I’d been expecting somewhere more exotic, not some backwater village. But it meant something to him. I could tell by the expression on his face. “Winhill, huh?”
Squall looked away from me, back to the clocktower. “Yeah.” For a while, he was silent. Then he asked, “Where would you want to go?”
The question took me aback for a minute. I hadn’t really thought about where I’d wanted to go on vacation considering, you know, mercenaries never got vacations. Sure, I had a few places where I went when I couldn’t handle life and needed to get away for a while, but none of them were important enough to me to want to share with Squall. “I don’t know. Somewhere with a lot of sun. Or maybe somewhere like a town caught on the edge of twilight.”
“Didn’t take you for much of a romantic.”
His tone was teasing, just on the edge of loving. I grinned. He’d indulge me, I was sure, if I asked him to. Squall met my eyes, his blue-grey gaze sparkling with held-back laughter. That made me feel good. I grinned wider. “I can be a romantic if I want to be. Have I ever told you about my romantic dream?”
The sparkle went out of his eyes. “Yeah. You did once.”
Shit. “Not that romantic dream. I’ll have you know I have a new one.”
Now he looked at me curiously. I wanted to take him into my arms and hold him close, whisper it into his ear and feel for myself how he reacted to what I had to say. Except we had an audience, so I settled for saying, “It involves you. Without leather.”
He blinked, honestly surprised. He glanced down at himself, then glanced back up at me. His head tilted to one side, and I wondered what he was doing, considering his stormy eyes had a strange glint to them.
Then his gaze shifted to over my shoulder. “It’s time, everyone.”
The deliverance of his words made something inside me tense. There were groans and mutters of indignancy behind me, but the others got to their feet, readied their weapons, and started after Squall as he led the way out of the courtyard and up the clocktower.
We emerged onto a long walkway, with only a single door at the end. The air felt oppressive. There was something malignant behind that door. A familiar weight pressed against my mind, but this time it wasn’t seeking a way to control me. I could tell that Squall felt it as well. He only gripped Lion Heart tighter and started forward. I realized that it was the feel of an unbound sorceress, a sorceress without a knight to ground her, to keep her on the side of good. It was the feel of a sorceress who had given herself over to madness, a madness borne of fear and loneliness and anger and hate. It was oppressive and slimy and rotten, a complete contrast from the feeling I got from Rinoa. Her presence felt like a warm summer breeze, full of life and promise. She stepped between Squall and I, so that we flanked her. Behind us, the others spread out, followers to the leaders.
Squall inhaled and let it out slowly. “This is it... Ultimecia is here. Ready?”
“Yeah.” I answered, gripping Hyperion with all the confidence I could muster.
“I’m ready.” Rinoa answered.
“Same.” Selphie said.
Irvine tipped his hat. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Quistis said, “Let’s finish this so we can go home.”
Zell punched his left fist into his right palm. “I’m ready to pay this bitch back for everything she’s done to us.”
Squall nodded. Then he led the way across the path to the door. He set his hand against the door and pushed.
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One (Last) Chance