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wipbigbang! *confetti* you can now read the completed fic here~i should really make an effort to post more WIPs here, for motivation if nothing else. anyway, posting this one as part of a tumblr WIP meme lol. originally wrote it sometime around 2017? i still really like it, just need to get around to finishing it!!!
it's post-game (by SEVERAL years) and eventual seifer/zell. premise based around the idea that time compression couldn't just be "fixed." general bad times being had by everyone.
Zell’d gotten a little more comfortable than he’d have liked with Esthar’s Great Plains over the years. Spring was always like this: all wind and dust storms. He could hear the transport over the wind now though, its motor growing quieter as it headed back towards Esthar City. She’d probably been telling him the pickup, he thought. Not that it really mattered, missions like this. He’d come out of it when and where it let him; no use trying to schedule it.
He was still close enough to the Salt Lake for the air to taste briny, and the ground underfoot crunched with traces of salt. It spun up around him as he headed inward, towards the sinkhole the aide had called him out here for. He’d been on leave, visiting Rinoa up at Winhill when he’d gotten called back for this. Squall and Quistis agreed that he was usually the best for these kinds of missions, seeing as he’d have the easiest time of it if he ended up without magic or weapons, which wasn’t exactly uncommon, dealing with these things.
They’d lost SeeDs to them. Operatives who’d go in and not come out again. Zell’d known a few of them himself. He didn’t mind being called off leave for this.
The sinkhole, the aide had told him, had opened up the previous week; a tech heading to the lunar base had spotted the dust cloud and detoured to check it out. They hadn’t lost any people to it yet, but they also knew enough by now not to send anyone in not with Garden.
The ground here was uneven, jutting up and down as if cut into oversized steps, some steep enough Zell needed to climb them. Their edges were sharp under the leather of his gloves as he’d heft himself up and over, breathing in the salt air. The dropoff hadn’t been that far from the spot—barely a twenty minute walk—and soon enough the sinkhole rose into view before him.
It didn’t seem like anything much, but they rarely did. He dropped his pack right at the edge and squatted down, peering into the bottomless dark. Quistis liked to be methodical about it, and Squall often humored her; most of the reports Zell’d seen by other SeeDs sent on missions like this followed her guidelines to the tee. Quistis was the only one of them, those of them who’d been on the Lunatic Pandora that day, who still kept up with the reports at all. They all knew what it was like after all. Horrifically unpredictable and yet always the exact same.
Zell sat on the edge, his legs dangling down into nothing for brief seconds before he pushed off, losing his grip on earth and sky and air as he fell into the black.
*
He hadn’t really had any dreams after, certainly not like Rinoa. He knew Irvine sometimes had nightmares, and later Selphie, too. It wasn’t until he’d unjunctioned Quezacoatl that he started seeing Ultimecia’s castle in his sleep.
It was like she’d been staving them off. He felt the ozone crackle of her for days after she was gone, and then the hole she’d left had filled in disjointed and warped, just like time compression.
Going down into these places was a little like that. He always expected to see Ultimecia’s castle again, but he never did.
When he landed this time it was in the ruins of a city, Deling maybe, he thought. Things here were never entirely foreign or familiar, just always constantly existing in a place of near-recognition. He felt like he’d been here before; he felt like a place like this couldn’t possibly exist. The air was stale and damp, with no salt-taste or spring chill. It was tepid, and his boots found a puddle every third step.
He still had his gloves, though he’d be fine without, and he cast his gaze side to side as he moved down and out the side street he’d ended up on. Everything appeared abandoned, some places obviously bombed out. He’d pass a building that would appear entirely whole yet smell of smoke and ash.
The city opened up into a square soon enough, and he looked up to find a sun eclipsed by clouds that shone a fuzzy, sickly green. The fountain at the center of the square had dried up, but when Zell got close enough he could hear the rush of water, and he knew if he bent to touch inside the empty basin it would feel wet.
He crossed to the far side of the square and took a seat on a bench angled with a perfect view of the fountain and the storefront beyond it. It had been a boutique by the looks of it. Manikins stood posed in the windows. A signboard proclaimed 25% off accessories in a looping pastel script. Zell heard the sound of rain start up just behind him but felt nothing, not even a change in the atmosphere. He rested his hands palm down over his knees and resisted the urge to grip until his joints popped.
Odine, Ellone, no one could have predicted this, he told himself again. And even if they could have, what choice did they have, really? They had had one chance to stop Ultimecia and they’d taken it. But breaking the world, it turned out, wasn’t something so easily undone.
They used to go down in pairs. Zell, like most of the others, had insisted on it. These bubbles, pockets—whatever they were—they persisted. He knew Squall still believed Ultimecia not truly defeated, despite what Rinoa said. Her magic, at least, seemed self-perpetuating: time compression continued, contained, in small bursts, all over the world, sputtering out only once one of them would take the jagged overlapping edges of corrupted time and heave them back into shape.
Selphie liked to joke about interior design sometimes: proper lighting, letting a room breathe. For Zell it’d always been more like draining a wound, an abscess. Cutting into and away at something so it could heal.
The boutique across from him caved in suddenly, soundlessly, accompanied only by his ears popping as if there’d been a sudden change in pressure. He felt a sudden presence at his side, like someone had sat on the bench next to him. He refused to look.
Squall had seen Ellone in a place like this once, Zell remembered. Rinoa had told him, maybe five years ago when he’d gone to visit her.
“It appeared as a forest for him,” she’d said. “Something ancient, with trees wider around than two Garden jeeps parked end-to-end. He said it was snowing, but he could only feel the snow, not see or hear or taste it. He heard his name and when he turned around there she was.”
“Shit.”
Rinoa’d nodded, then abruptly shook her head. “I should be out there with you all. You shouldn’t have to do this on your own. I wish you would let me—”
He’d had to talk her down, and he hated doing that. He’d never found out what had happened with Ellone, but he could guess.
The presence at his side did nothing more than exist, and Zell was happy to ignore it for now. He’d blinked and the boutique was whole again, though the sign was now smeared, as if the chalk had been washed away by rain.
He knew he’d have to continue on again soon, but it got harder every time he took one of these missions. He thought things might actually be easier if he’d drop down into Ultimecia’s castle, if she really was there waiting for them. He’d rather a definite target, even one impossible to beat on his own, over this.
He waited until he could no longer feel the presence next to him before rising and heading deeper into the city. A bell tower rose above the other roofs, providing him a destination. He’d heard it off and on, as he’d been waiting, though now setting his eyes on it, it neither moved nor made a sound. He was making too straight a path, he realized, when he heard a voice beside him whisper, “You shouldn’t.”
He didn’t stop moving, but he changed course, zigzagging back through sidestreets. He could hear whispers occasionally, but nothing solidifying into words he could make out. After a while he wasn’t sure that what he was hearing wasn’t rain. He felt it intermittently, when it wanted to be felt, he guessed. He walked for what felt like minutes or an eternity, the green sun moving down and then back up to its position dead center of the sky.
His hair’d gotten wet enough that it hung down in clumps, sticking to his skin, and he’d occasionally remember to push it out of his eyes or behind his ears. He noticed, finally, a buzzing that had started up what felt like inside his head. The closer he got to the bell tower the louder it became. He kept pressing against his ears, as if that could stop it, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead and moving forward constantly, but the buzzing got so loud he could feel it as vibrations. He had to keep his palms pressed to his ears to keep the tickling feeling from driving him crazy. He passed the body the first time without truly registering it. It was only the second time he tracked grey at the corner of his eye that he paused, turning.
It was a man, facing away from him, and he was only there a moment before the place where he’d been standing was bombed. There was no sound, no debris. Suddenly the spot just went concave; a violence so absolutely contained it took Zell a while to even process it.
He kept walking.
The buzzing plateaued, finally, and Zell grit his teeth against it, cursing as if to drown it out. His voice cut through the city like an alarm. The buildings where he was were so congested he could no longer look up and spot the bell tower. The man was back again.
He stood to Zell’s right, and far enough back that Zell had to turn to see him fully. He still had his back to Zell and he was hunched, looking down at his feet. Or no, Zell realized, at his hands. He was at just enough of an angle that Zell could tell he was holding his hands out in front of him. In supplication maybe, in a plea.
The buzzing had plateaued, but it was still nearly overwhelming. “Hello?” he could barely even recognize his own voice, filtered back through his hands still held over his ears, filtered back through the static.
Zell felt both that he knew the man and that he had never seen him before, but the thing was, he recognized the jacket.
The ground went concave and the man was gone.
He had to get to the bell tower.
*
Rinoa’s cottage up at Winhill was nice, really. Pretty much the definition of ‘quaint.’ They’d all planned on going up with her to pick it out, then later to help her unpack and set everything up, but in the end only he and Selphie had gone. There was too much to be done, Quistis had said. Even Selphie had only stayed till the end of the week before she was called back to Trabia. The sinkholes had started opening up nearly everywhere by then, though they hadn’t entirely figured out what they were, or how to stop them.
Zell’d simply had nowhere else to be.
He’d set up a porch swing for Rinoa and they’d sit out on it in the evenings, watching the sun go down and the fireflies come out in summer. Rinoa was still pretty bad off then, and would start shaking, sometimes so much so that Zell thought she would never stop, and the only thing he could think to do was bring her out to the swing where they could slowly sway together, back and forth, until her tremors had ceased.
Something had gone wrong when Ultimecia had died, was what they all figured. Her powers should have gone to Rinoa, to another sorceress, but instead they’d rent the world.
“What’s it like, going down there?” she’d asked him once. He hadn’t known how to tell her the truth, so instead he’d just said it was like suddenly having the memories of another person, something they’d told you before, so you could recognize it, but having never experienced it yourself, everything still felt completely new.
“Sounds like a dream,” she’d said.
The space where he knew the bell tower had to be was suddenly a pit filled with bodies. The buzzing inside his head shifted into the buzzing of flies, finally external, but rippling through him viscerally in the process. He found himself on his knees, heaving.
Nightmares shifted like this, not that he’d ever tell Rinoa.
“I think it’s Centra,” said a voice to his right and slightly behind him. Zell wished he didn’t know the voice.
“What,” he said, struggling to his feet, wanting to look away from the bodies but unwilling to look behind him.
“Before the Lunatic Pandora was used, I think. Seems like they’re killing each other, and not the monsters doing it.”
Zell wished he hadn’t said anything at all. Wished he hadn’t acknowledged the presence in the first place. It’d taken form now. He knew if he reached out it’d feel as solid as its words.
“You’re saying we’re in the past, then?”
A chuckle, “Near as anything like the past can exist here, yeah.”
You’re dead, he wanted to say suddenly. He had to fight to keep the words from slipping out. He kept thinking of Squall meeting Ellone in the woods, in a snowfall that only existed to the touch.
He had to think of the mission and only the mission. If this was Centra, then it was definitely the past, and knowing the when of the place would make things easier.
He nodded, squaring his shoulders. “Where’s the—”
“Come on, Dincht, how many years has it been and you’re not even going to acknowledge me?”
*
Before they’d really understood what the sinkholes were, what was causing them, there were a lot of casualties: people who would get too close and vanish. The SeeDs they’d send after them never found a trace. The SeeDs who would go missing would never leave a trace either. It was like they’d just been simply erased.
Seifer Almasy had gone missing after they’d faced him that last time. Rinoa thought he’d never made it out of time compression. It had horrified Zell, when she’d told him that. He’d never liked the guy, even before they’d fought on different sides of a war, but he’d grown up with him, he’d known him. When Zell started dreaming about Ultimecia’s castle he always woke thinking about Seifer stuck there. Trapped. Living an eternity of Zell’s nightmares.
It was a comfort, thinking of him as merely dead.
Seifer Almasy stood, familiar smirk on his lips, looking like he did when Zell was 17 and Seifer’d caught him sprinting through the halls, late for class. It’d been over twenty years since Zell had seen him last.
Rinoa hadn’t told him how Ellone had appeared to Squall, what kind of specter she’d made. Seifer looked like he did the last time they’d faced off against him: beaten, too tired for merely 19. But, like the rain that both was and wasn’t, he also looked like he’d aged, much as Zell had. His blond hair was streaked with grey, and then it wasn’t. Zell felt like he could scream and then keep screaming. He wanted to fill the silence with protestations.
“Seifer,” he said, measuring the syllables. He hadn’t said the name aloud in at least a decade. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, I’d imagine,” Seifer said, looking 19 and 40 simultaneously, “trying to fix this mess.” When Zell said nothing, he continued, his smirk stretching his lips wider. “That is what you’re down here for isn’t it, Dincht? Garden sent you to clean up your fearless leader’s mess?”
Zell was used to the distortions by now, so it wasn’t the wall phasing away behind Seifer’s back as it hit it that shocked him, or even the way Seifer’s form seemed to even out as soon as he touched him, freezing at middle-aged and tired, washed-out. It was his own anger. He hadn’t known he could get that angry still. Hadn’t known he could feel anything but numb.
“Nice to. See you too, Dincht,” Seifer wheezed through the grip Zell had on his throat. “Good to see. I’m so fondly. Remembered.”
When Zell released him he flickered back to both past and present, young and old.
“You don’t get to say that about him,” Zell found himself saying. “Not after what you did. You helped her. You helped her kill students, kill civilians. And you want to blame Squall for this?”
He wasn’t shouting. His voice had stayed even; he felt the anger simmering still but it was locked away somehow, where he couldn’t reach it.
Seifer was looking at him funny. Then he smiled, mean like he used to. “Is that what you all have been doing all this time? Blaming me for this? No wonder these rifts keep popping up. You really are hopeless, Dincht.”
You’re dead, Zell thought. Instead he said, “We’re doing what we can. We’ve been closing them.”
“And new ones popping up all the time, hm?”
“We didn’t have any other choice. Not after you woke Adel. We had to let her compress time to even fight her, Seifer, you have to know that.”
“Trying to convince me with that shit, Dincht? I didn’t approach you so you could feed me your excuses.”
It hit him like a slap. Could ghosts move willfully? Couldn’t they just be summoned? Their graves trodden over till they woke.
It was like surfacing from a great depth, fighting his way back to speech. “I already asked you what you were doing here.”
Seifer rolled his eyes. “And I already told you. I can close this rift on my own but it’s easier if I have help, and I assume that’s what you’re here for. To help?”
“Why would you—”
“Help?” Zell thought Seifer’s smirk looked like it hurt him. “I’ve been here a long time, Dincht. A real long fucking time. You think I wanted this?”
Zell didn’t think anyone wanted this. Save for Ultimecia.
“I was a stupid fucking kid, same as you and Squall and all the rest. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna live the rest of my life making the same mistakes.”
But you’re dead, Zell thought again.
“Besides,” Seifer continued, arms spreading dramatically to encompass the whole of the shelled out building they stood in. Rain poured in through the open hole where the roof had been, and Zell only just then felt it. “It’s been nothing but shit like this for ages, Dincht. What the hell else am I gonna do?”
*
Back when they’d used to go down in small groups, or at least pairs, there was always someone with a GF junctioned. They needed someone with access to paramagic just in case, even when it became apparent that the rifts were affecting it. It always hit Zell as a taste, trying to cast down here. Healing magic was the worst. Esuna tasted like vinegar; Curaga like blood. Life was indescribable; it made him gag, every time, and hung around as an aftertaste for hours, even after they’d closed the rift.
He used to joke with Selphie about it; spells came through her as sounds. She had the hardest time with defensive spells, confiding that Shell was the worst because it came as complete silence, and she couldn’t stand the temporary deafness. Protect was less severe for her, merely muffling sound till it seemed that everything came at her as if she were submerged in water. She told him once that Cure was screams and he couldn’t stop thinking about it for days after, him tasting blood and her hearing screams.
How’s life taste today, she’d ask.
Like shit, he’d reply. And they’d both laugh like it was hilarious.
They stopped going in as teams when Nida accidentally killed the SeeD he’d been partnered with, an archer named Liris. Zell had read Nida’s report after and it made about as much sense as any of his own experiences. Liris had disappeared. He’d begun hearing things, feeling things that weren’t there. When the rift started actively trying to kill him he fought back. He’d brought his quarterstaff down for a killing blow on a Galbadian soldier and when he’d pulled back it was Liris. She’d been the dedicated magic user on their team and he’d used his last phoenix down hours earlier, before he’d lost sight of her.
They were told after how something like this could happen, and how to avoid it. They lost two more SeeD the same way before Squall stopped team missions altogether.
Zell was, selfishly, glad he no longer would have to be responsible for magic.
Seifer cast Firaga with all the fierceness he’d ever had, and if it came with any side effects Zell couldn’t tell by looking at him.
He must still have someone junctioned, Zell reasoned, stepping over the crumbling remains of the wall Seifer’d blasted. The rift kept sprouting them.
“We’re definitely headed in the right direction, then,” Seifer mumbled, casting again with a quick flick of his wrist, as if it cost him absolutely nothing.
Zell agreed. The rift never worked so hard as it did when they drew closer to its center.
He’d agreed, simply, to Seifer helping him. Seifer’d cocked an eyebrow at him, waiting for Zell to add an addendum, he figured. You can come but only if you do what I say, only if you stay out of my way, only if
But Zell didn’t particularly care what Seifer did. Wasn’t even sure he was really there, even as he burnt down another wall.
Fine, he’d said, and stepped back from Seifer to head back towards the bell tower.
Just like that, Dincht?
Just like that.
Only the bell tower, the pit of bodies that had spread out where it’d been, was gone. The buzzing, too, was gone, Zell realized.
Calling it the center of the rift meant approximately nothing, it was merely a way to categorize it. Go deeper as the rift will let you, until you can reach the part of it you can change, then you change it. Quistis’s version was wordier, but it amounted to the same thing. Zell figured the bell tower was the center, and Seifer’d said nothing to gainsay him, so he’d done the only thing he could and pressed forward.
They’d hit stairs eventually; the entrance to some kind of underground mall. They’d just passed through the entrance when the city flipped, the green sun once again burning overhead where before the weight of the streets had pressed down. Their footsteps still echoed like they were underground, the sky cavernous.
The walls started appearing soon after.
“So, Dincht,” Seifer said, kicking bits of rubble out of his way, “Exactly how long has it been? You’re not exactly looking like a spring chicken.”
Zell stared at him.
Seifer’s smirk didn’t falter. “Lost your sense of humor, eh Dincht? Not that you ever had much of one. Still, awful rude of you not to keep up your half of the conversation.” The sun blinked out into fluorescent lighting on the next step, their path once again closed in underground. The sound of explosions reverberated dully down to them. Zell thought he could hear an air raid siren.
“Not even gonna take pity on a guy a little, are you? That’s almost cruel of you, Dincht. Now that’s something you never struck me as being. Little too fond of following the rules, sure, but—”
“Twenty years.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s been around twenty years since we fought you last. Since Ultimecia compressed time.”
It was definitely an air raid siren. Zell could no longer hear the explosions; merely feel them as they shook down to the earth under his feet. They’d passed a few stores coming in, but now all the buildings they were passing looked residential. Doors stood open, and Zell caught one glimpse after another of empty living rooms, kitchens, entranceways lined with shoes or coats on hangers. A tea kettle was whistling on the stove, and it was the only audible noise save for their footsteps.
“Huh,” Seifer said. “Seems like longer.”
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Date: 2024-07-01 07:21 am (UTC)(also A+++ seifer icon)
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Date: 2024-11-17 01:52 pm (UTC)(im glad you like my slapped together seifer icon, the bg text is quotes of his that are lame)
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Date: 2024-11-18 01:35 am (UTC)(lmao i feel like that would cover most of his dialogue)