#saigeonmain

  He hadn’t expected for the afternoon to end up like this. He’d been careful with Rinoa since the incident, mindful of her worries, fears, discomforts, pains. He did not press her or guilt her when she pulled away, the paragon of patience as they worked through a difficult time together.

  But here they were, him splayed on his bed with the dark-haired woman straddling his legs, kissing him, tugging at his clothing, making quick work of belts that rattled and alarmed him to delicate fingers plucking apart buttons and zippers to dive in and arrest him in her grip.

  His breath hitched against her mouth as hands hovered near her shoulders, conflicted on where to rest before settling on the sides of her face as he gazed up at her with bewildered, lust-addled blues, drifting from one honeyed brown to the other. “You’ve got me,” he reassured her with a breathy chuckle, kissing her lips again as his hips squirmed ever so slightly between her legs. Still, things seemed to be moving quickly, considering they hadn’t done anything like this in weeks.

Squall has pre-grounded Rinoa Heartilly on the basis that she will do something naughty in the near future.

        𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐁𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐋, 𝐇𝐔𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐀𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐄𝐒, the worst of their fights and the release that came after, the tender moments and those filled with laughter. they chase him like ghosts down halls that they’d never once tread during their time together --- a misplaced memory, a fervent wish. reality holds little over the yearning of a tired heart, but it’s enough. it’s enough. it steers him clear of the library, encourages swiftness in the hall leading to his room, imprisons him with tortured slumber, or a complete lack thereof when finally in its barely salvaged confines.

        hollow, he finds. he’s hollow, worn, yet he won’t quit even as every other part of him fails. what will happen first --- will his body give in or will he bend the knee ? a failure, it is, that the man can’t acknowledge that is it fear that spurs him into ignorance and not fool’s pride.

        avoidance comes easy. seifer is busy tending to whatever duties garden saddles him with for any given day. repairs, checking equipment is up to code, grading written examinations the instructors were too lazy to do themselves. he’s a smart boy, they’d surmised, put him to work. there isn’t a thing he can do to defy us without jeopardizing himself. it makes it easy to forget her.

        almost.

        she corners him as he’s fixing the lights in the training center. with the makeout spot at his rear, there’s no way for him to escape without pushing past her. so seifer steps as far back as possible, the wall pressing into his back. cyan eyes look anywhere but at rinoa, his stance that of a typical garden standby. a position of comfort, ironically enough, for one who despises the control the system tried to hold over him.

        when did you break, boy ? when did they win ?

        lips that would once sharply curl at the sight of her remain slack, no bite of laughter --- nervous or otherwise --- making an appearance without its company. truthfully, he doesn’t know how to act. there is no face to show when everything about him incited fear enough that it would prompt the slumbering sorceress to hold the princess hostage and tear through him once more with a renewed vengeance.

        so he ignores her, his head turning away to look out at the stars that were beginning to appear as the world around them grew dark. how many times had they been beset with the very same sight albeit with different surrounding scenery ? too many. fingers dig into the wall, his throat grows impossibly tight.

        “ please, don’t ignore me. ”

        to not hear her he would have to be deaf, and he’s not. he’s more aware of her presence there, focusing on it, even as he refuses to meet her eyes, to react in any other way to the feeling of her gaze upon him.

        “ admit it, you can’t say no to me. ”

        “ can and totally have, rin. ”

        but when she’d put on those baby doll eyes back then, he’d almost never been able to say no to her whims if they weren’t utterly ridiculous. 

        if i look now, will they have the same effect ?

        before the thought has even completely crossed mind, seifer is letting rinoa reclaim her position in the foreground. those eyes, he searches for them, but they’re not the ones she uses to look at him now. this isn’t back then. that isn’t what they are now. some part of him still believes he can find them, though, if he peers close enough. because the truth of the matter is he could never fear those eyes and, most importantly, he could never deny them.

        you’re right. i can’t say no to you.

A small breath, it caught in her chest for a moment, was she being serious?

“Ri…” the name was spoken as a breath, a whisper, Selphie didn’t want to tread on ground that she wouldn’t be able to get back out of. There was a simmering undercurrent of nerves. She knew how she felt. How Rinoa gave her butterflies, the way her skin felt like static electricity when she touched her, the way Selphie looked at her when she thought Rinoa (and anyone else) wouldn’t notice.

“I-“ fuck.

There’s red creeping across her cheeks.

Gods, there was a screaming urge within her, to open her mouth and let the confession fall from her. “Rinoa…” pulling her arm back, she held it close to her body, green eye’s fell to the floor, to look at her boots as she shifted awkwardly on the spot.

Her chest hurt, how was this so awkward? Well, Selphie knew why, knew what backlash could come, in more than one way.

Then she smiled. Maybe she didn’t have to follow through.

A shake of her head.

She could row this back still.

What was worse, unrequited love and making everything so awkward when it backfired, or holding a secret in her chest for the rest of her life? She would rather have her friendship, then risk it all, and have nothing at all.

“It’s…lets just…not joke about it, right?” It was painful, it made her want to spill her soul out into the space between them. Tell her that her smile lit the whole day up, that her laugh was infectious, that it made her heart skip a beat.

‘come make friend with kuja’ blank detects a lie

Too bad, Zell. No one gets days off around here, especially not SeeD lieutenants that directly report to the lieutenant commander. She sets a massive pile of field reports that need going through on his desk, eclipsing the work that’s already there, and rights some of the papers that he’d scattered in his startlement.