It's a fic, written by me. Yeah, I didn't see it coming, either.

I present to you my answer to the Trapezoidal Challenge prompt, Seifer finds out who his parents are - two utterly normal civilians who died in the Sorceress War. He reflects. I actually wrote the first draft on my vintage Royal manual typewriter (the second story to be written in this manner) around last February, let it languish for a few months, typed the second draft up on the computer, let it languish for a few months again, and finally finished the third draft fifteen minutes ago. It's my longest one-shot to date; enjoy!

Title: The Anticlimax
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Word Count: ~3,600
Warning(s): swearing, plot spoilers, and (this is me we're talking about, after all) crazy time shit. Craaazy time shit.



The Anticlimax
K. Leigh Clapp

)()(

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.

– Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos”

)()(

The whole trial is brutal in its sequentiality, in its march of Exhibit A, then Exhibit B and then Exhibit C, and never does E come before D. Each step in the process comes as a blow precisely placed, as sharp and regular as a chopping knife in the hand of a skilled chief.

The prosecutor speaks in a straight line, each of her gestures thrown forward in staccato punctuation as if she cannot advance her rigorous chain of logic too far. She spits out her words, and each one is a block in a long line of dominoes pointed directly at his heart.

Around the seventh or eighth day of the trial, he begins to be certain the first domino, the one at the head of this murderous line, will soon fall. And indeed, early on the ninth day the tribunal withdraws to convene. Forty minutes later they return and the judge pronounces, “On the counts of high treason and war crimes against the sovereign nation of Galbadia, this military court finds Seifer Almasy guilty.”

The bang of the gavel is thunderous, and the vaulted ceiling of the courtroom peels away like the rind off an orange as the hull of Galbadia Garden rams the bloated curve of Balamb Garden. Seifer is silent, and barking out orders to Galbadian paratroopers, while the judge continues, “The sentence is execution at midnight on this day. Court is adjourned.”

The dominoes fall in a neat sequential march, one after another. They clack like the high-velocity bullets X-ATM092 spits out of its spinning barrels, so fast Seifer can see the lumps of metal start to melt in the instant they leave the chamber. The sun is hot in the orange sky of Dollet and the sand kicked up by his own boots blind him. A counterpart to X-ATM092’s punishing barrage tears into the air around him as ahead of him Quistis opens fire from the turret atop the submarine and as murmuring voices swell outward from the court audience, mostly of nonsurprise and vindication.

He deserves it, they are saying. Seated behind his desk, Cid tells him he does not yet deserve the rank of SeeD. Try again next year. Seifer stands there and he wants to ask him which next year is that, you old vest-wearing fart, they’re all collapsing down into each other, I can do ‘em all now, would you like the next year after the First Sorceress War was ended by Adel’s sealing, or the next year after your wife went fucking crazy with sorceress dreams and turned into this hot babe – that slinky little black dress was the only good thing that came out of this Hyne-shitty mess, eh?

Guards on either side of him take his upper arms in a businesslike way, and he lets them draw him forward. The crowd eddies and parts, Odin tearing down the middle, his death reverberating around the eerie chambers of Lunatic Pandora, to reveal –

“Find the legendary Lunatic Pandora, said to be hidden beneath the ocean. Only then shall the sorceress provide you with dreams again.”

– Of course. Seifer wants to think the two words cynically, but his heart begins to pound within its ribcage once he sees him.

The others are right behind him like a tumbleful of poodles yipping at the heels of their owner. But him, there is nothing metaphorical about him. He stands there in his SeeD uniform, red-and-gold piping and Estharian medals rich against fine black cloth in the dark golden illumination of chandelier-light as he whirls awkwardly across the ballroom in the gay, laughing wake of her.

Seifer never saw that. He did not attend the ball, but sat in his room in the darkness, Hyperion in its case across his knees. But he has learned Time Compression does not care about such petty details.

She stands next to him, brown eyes large with sadness. Then she turns to him and, as she whispers in his ear, she walks across the vast floor of a melting ballroom where hours trickle down the walls like wet paint. Her face is a bright white void, and Seifer instantly recognizes the satin-sharp click of high heels against an impossible marble floor. She finishes pouring whatever words she wanted down his ear, and he looks up at Seifer for only a moment. Then he is walking out of the courtroom, and they follow him across fields of wildflowers.

The guards firmly guide him toward the back of the courtroom, leaving behind a pale sun which shines through a steel-gray sky to darkly illuminate Ultimecia on her throne. The iridescent wings flanking the throne look like decoration, but they breathe with every word the sorceress intones.

“Time shall compress. All existence denied.”

She speaks in circles. And her logic is circular.

Only half of that came true, you psycho bitch, thinks Seifer. Then he thinks, Ow, because the needle is thick and jabbing into what must be not a vein but a fucking muscle cluster even though the technicians tried so hard to look like they knew what they were doing. Then he can’t really think anything else, for the poison is creeping through his bloodstream, shutting down his nerve receptors and sniffing out his heart, which clenches, spasms –

– But no, that hasn’t happened yet. It’s still in the future, fourteen hours away at midnight. He’s pretty sure of this. Pretty sure.





He already can tell this is going to be one of those bad hair days, when a particular echo clamps down on him and refuses to let go. Ultimecia glowers at him from across the small cell as she grinds out over and over again, “Kurse all SeeDs. Swarming like lokust akross generations. You disgust me.”

She will shimmer a bit, like a mirage on the highway on a hot summer day, then wind up all over again. “SeeD . . . SeeD . . . SeeD . . . SeeD, SeeD, SeeD! Kurse all SeeDs.”

Seifer leans forward, elbows on knees and wrists bound together by handcuffs. “You can tell me. That accent’s totally fake, right? Come on, I’ll take the secret with me to my grave.”

Or will he? Would Time Compression decide to stop bothering him just because at a certain point along the timeline he happens to be no longer alive? The logic Time Compression follows, after all, seems not to be the linear chain of the prosecutor but the terrible circles traced by Ultimecia in the throes of insanity.

As if to remind him he is starting to think too rationally and that this will not do at all, Squall appears in the corridor outside. He is in plain civilians, neither his beloved fur collar nor three belts in sight, and Seifer goes momentarily cross-eyed trying to place him in one time frame.

“Seifer,” says Squall. “I’m. Really here.”

“You’ve never heard of drawing out the suspense, then,” says Seifer easily. He doesn’t need Leonhart thinking he’s some poor crazy bastard that needs rescuing, because he’s sure that in the twisted space Squall calls his mind, he’ll find a way to equate him with a damsel in distress. Or maybe he feels he owes Seifer. Fuck pity.

“So, all right, you’re sequential. A, then B and C, and never E before D.” Seifer makes a little square with his index fingers. “You’re squa-are, Squally boy.” He chuckles to himself.

As if to punctuate his train of thought, Ultimecia suddenly throws her arms out to her sides and cries, “Insolent fools! Your vain krusade ends here, SeeDs.”

Squall stands there, a silent statue behind the bars. The metal rods begin to bend inward, the air around them boiling so that he looks like he is underwater. Seifer considers warning him the missiles are on their way and he should get out while the getting is still good. Or that the missiles have already come and gone, and he should have gotten out back then while the getting was still good because now if there are no missiles to run from, he will not run, and so the missiles will fry him because there were no missiles to run from.

He gets confused and gives up, watching the bars rupture into white-hot gobs of sizzling iron. They splatter all over Squall, who roars in pain and anger, one foot sliding across the rocky moor as his shoulders twist to bring up his gunblade, face a smear of blood.

Somewhere, there is the rushing sound of feathers.

“It’s half past ten,” says Squall. He stands in the hall in his incongruous civilians, face set like stone and framed by the solid iron bars.

“Or a quarter before three quarters past ten. I wonder if it divides up like the half-full, half-empty glass. Do pessimists choose quarter before eleven, and optimists three quarters past eleven? Or maybe it’s the other way around.” Seifer leans back on his thin cot and butts his shoulder blades up against the wall. He stretches his long legs out in front of him and crosses them at the ankles. They have given him standard-issue white canvas slip-ons. No shoestring with which to strangle a guard or hang oneself. Not that he was thinking about the latter. “Actually, I think it’s the other way around. Pessimists are always mourning the time lost, while optimists keep their eyes forever fixed on the future in anticipation of its coming.”

The word future tastes odd in his mouth. Like he just swallowed some rotten silk. Why would he put silk in his mouth in the first place?

No, it is the taste of the chemical cocktail they are going to shoot up his arm in just less than an hour and a half. They have already pumped him full of poison like a pest problem, and he is strapped into the chair, getting used to being dead, while onlookers observe him through the glass window. They look at him, not realizing he is also getting used to experiencing being alive through Time Compression while being dead.

“Midnight, Seifer.” Squall is doing nothing except looking at him through those bars. His eyes are the noncolor of gunmetal.

“I know you don’t talk much, but this is too minimal even for you. Let’s try again. ‘Midnight, Seifer, you are going to be executed. And I’m here to dance on your grave because, hey, I’m a busy man. I got places to be, things to do, times to be.”

“You don’t really think that.” Squall says it not as a question or an accusation. It is a statement.

Seifer feels a flash of rage at him. The sort that makes his gut clench. “You’re not here to do a hundred-eighty and pardon me.”

“It’s not in my jurisdiction, anyway, even if I thought it was a good idea.”

Another flash. Squall had said ‘even if I thought it was a good idea.’ Not ‘even if I wanted to,’ but some abstract excuse for the good of the nation so mamas can tuck in their babies at night safely and all that shit.

“Is this Esthar’s punishment on top of Galbadia’s, then? Making me spend the last hour of my life with you?”

“Galbadia doesn’t care what happens to you after death, so Balamb Garden will claim your body.”

“Don’t I feel fucking special. And there’s a catch, and you’re here to tell me about that catch. There’s always a catch, even in death.”

Squall looks at Seifer for a long time. His eyes are more of a pale glacier blue now, thin and sharp. “There are two burial alternatives. Cid thought we should ask you which one you prefer.”

Seifer’s mouth is dry. Ultimecia shrieks and melts into the massive torso of Griever. “Reflect on your childhood.”

“The first option is to inter your ashes at the memorial for deep-undercover SeeDs. No one would know.”

“Time . . . It will not wait . . . ” Ultimecia’s words echo across a black void punctuated by frail pinpricks of stars that only serve to make everything seem emptier. Comets wheel beneath the feet of the two men. Then Squall takes a step over the abyss. He lifts one boot and sets it down again over nothing. Moving not slowly but deliberately – anyone else would say he is moving slowly, but Seifer knows Squall does everything with a stripped-down form of intent – he takes something out of his pocket.

It is a key. Squall lifts the single wildflower up before himself.

“Oh, Squall, is that for me?” asks Ellone, young and mature in that way some girls on the cusp of growing up – or leaving their childhood behind – have.

Squall nods solemnly. Brown eyes shining, Ellone bends down to let him tuck it behind her ear. His child’s fingers are too awkward, so finally she puts her own hands over his and secures the flower. She straightens, the wind from the ocean ruffling the yellow petals. She spots Seifer, and smiles.

“Do you want to hear a story, Seifer?”

The other children dance around her, chirping, “We do! We do! Tell us a story, Big Sister!” Quistis and Selphie trail daisy chains behind them, and Zell laughs in his high squeaky stutter.

“Okay. Once upon a time there was a posse . . . ”

The key clicks in the lock. The flowers ruffling in the wind are cold stars spinning along the colder black lines of space. Above them all stands Ultimecia talking in circles and weaving her circular logic.

Ellone’s face is a white blankness, and her hair is on fire. The missiles have incinerated Trabia Garden and everything is on fire. She rasps out, before her vocal cords can burn completely away, “Posse . . . We are. We always will be. Because we’re a posse, we want to help you. Whatever it takes to fulfill your dreams, we’re willing to do. But . . . you’re being manipulated, Seifer. You’ve lost yourself and your dream.”

Squall pushes the cell door aside. Ellone falls to her knees and hands, hardly anything more than a concentration of char and ash. Her head hangs down, too heavy for her blistered neck, and the pristine flower slips out from behind the black nub that once was an ear. It flutters over the railing of the White SeeD ship and sinks beneath the waves. Without knowing it, in his trip across the concrete floor Squall scatters Ellone in the wake of his boots.

He takes a firm grip of Seifer’s wrist, and the world snaps back into sequentiality. The click of the key unlocking the handcuffs is loud and clear.

“The second option is to bury you in an unmarked grave next to this particular plot.” Squall hands him a single piece of carbon copy paper.

He reads it, unravels the blurry lines stamped across thin yellow pulp. Makes out the name of some small town in southern Galbadia he has never heard of before, the bureaucratic details of two persons, two tombstones, two tallies of collateral damage in the Sorceress War.

“What?” His own voice is far away, like a verse from a lullaby only half-remembered in a childhood memory.

Excitate vos e somno, liberi mei
Cunae non sunt . . .

“You’re just eating out of someone’s hand,” says Fujin while the children dance around her, the girls trailing daisy chains in their small plump hands. “Since we can’t get through to you, all we have now to rely on is Squall. We want the old you back.”

He rises to his feet. “What obscenity is this? What sort of sick joke is this?”

He is dimly aware of his own voice rising. Cutting low under it, as inexorable as the bullet spiraling toward Edea, impelled on its orbit by Irvine with his head chockfull of memories, is Fujin’s voice. “It’s sad . . . Sad that we only have Squall to rely on.”

Thoughtful, she looks up at the Garden passing overhead, its shadow trailing over her delicate, angular face. Seifer shakes the carbon copy in one fist, his arm muscles seizing violently.

“My parents were not – not civilians. They were – “

He realizes with horror he has just been about to say ‘knights.’ He screams at Squall.

“You had to beat me in everyth – even in BIRTH!”

A six-year-old Seifer stands with arms outstretched at the edge of the shore, the orphanage at his back, and shouts into the setting sun as he skips pebbles toward it across the waves. “The knight has retired. I guess you could call me a young revolutionary. I’ve always gotta be doing somethin’ BIG! I don’t wanna stop. I’m gonna keep running! I’ve come this far . . . I’m gonna make it to the end, to the goal! There’s no way I’m sharing it with you!”

He sits back down on the cot heavily. Squall watches him, an expression on his face. Seifer does not think it is one of pity.

“You don’t have to decide now. You still have – “ He glances at the clock in the hall. “An hour and ten minutes. You can indicate your choice on this paper. Rip it in half for the first option, and leave it intact for the second. Tuck it inside your shoe. The right people will find it.”

Edea smiles at him, seductive, from her throne on the parade float. It is a smile of scorpions made from black diamond and of dark silk that flays the skin off fingers even as they caress it. “Such a confused little boy,” she murmurs. “Are you going to step forward? Retreat? You have to decide.”

Don’t call me a boy, thinks Seifer automatically. Squall gives him one more look. He is standing erect, like a good soldier or statesman, and Seifer is seated with shoulders bowed inward, but he has the strange, very natural sensation that they are looking directly into each other’s eyes. Then Squall pivots on his heels and walks back to the door. Edea’s voice trails after him like the woman in a formal dance. Steps revolving around, over, and under each other. Rinoa’s laughter tinkles like the golden chandeliers in the golden ballroom across which she sways in her golden dress.

“You can’t make up your mind. You don’t know the right answer. You want help, don’t you? You want to be saved from this predicament.” If he yells at her in his mind to shut up, will she hear and follow? “Don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Besides, you’re only a little boy.”

Squall begins to depart, leaving the door ajar behind him.

“You forgot the door.” Seifer’s voice belongs to a stranger that has traveled through a burning desert for days, throat and lungs on fire.

“No, Seifer, I didn’t.”

Edea lets out a delighted gasp. “You don’t want to be a boy anymore?”

“Why?” he manages to ask.

Squall looks over his shoulder at him. “Because you tortured me in D-District Prison. Because before that, you were my sparring partner. And because long before that . . . “

He looks weary.

“We listened together to a girl named Ellone tell stories by the ocean, as the wind ruffled wildflowers all around us.”

Then he is gone, footsteps quiet and fading away down the corridor. Seifer looks at the open door and, beyond it, the ticking clock. The hands are moving so slowly. Even the second hand. Pent up over the long years, the hours pour out of the clock and trickle down the forbidding outerwork of the Dollet Communications Tower like melting wax. The sun beats down a dull yellow heat on his shoulders as he asks Squall about his dream.

“You have one too, don’t you?”

Squall looks at him, and through him, with those terrible eyes. The eyes of a man who succeeded at everything in his life, when all the while he was terrified of failing.

“ . . . Sorry, but I’m gonna pass on that subject.”

Seifer sits in the cell with the carbon copy bearing his parents’ unremarkable names and births and deaths, handcuffs loose around his wrist, and watches the three hands on the clock run backward and forward. Time bends in upon itself, and he sees clearly himself taking the route out of the prison, sees the quarter moon that will guide his footsteps and hide any pursuers’ eyes.

He tastes the chemical toxin at the back of his tongue.

“You’re square, Leonhart,” he says to the empty cell. “And I’m outside the box.”

In an hour, the guards will come for him. They will look through the open door and see either Seifer Almasy, Sorceress’ Knight, sitting on the cot or an empty cell. Because they are sequential, each second of their life a domino block that falls only to strike the next domino block. But he, can’t he stay here always in this golden divide between instant and eternity where the clock simply has no hands, swinging his legs over the edge of the pier, feeling the water’s cool on the soles of his bare feet and the warm sunlight melting over and down his back, forever oscillating between two timelines?

Seifer looks back down at the carbon copy, wispy and coarse in his hands like a dead moth’s wing. Slowly he begins to read it again. He no longer hears the clock ticking.

)()(