FFVIII, "Shell", For fudebusho
Title:Shell
For: fudebusho
Medium: Fanfic, penguin poop
Request(s): Zell/Quistis
Fandom(s): Final Fantasy VIII
Characters/Pairings: Zell/Quistis
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Feedback: Mildly constructive, please, and keep in mind that there's stylistic experimentation going on here. I like my crit like I like my lego; pretty, brightly coloured, and shapely enough that with it you can learn how to build something new.
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 2987, and the hundred or so words I yelled at the screen
Summary: Zell catches Quistis in the act.
Notes: I hope you that you enjoy this! Since you left the prompt wide open, I went for something comic and played around with the style. The pairing isn't particularly strong, but I hope this is at least a little like something you were looking for.
So a guy walks into a bar and there’s a girl - a hot girl, the kind with legs that go on forever and eyes like moonbeams and sparkles and shit - and their eyes meet. He sees her, and she sees him. They glance across a crowded room. They talk. They smile. They smoulder over funny-coloured drinks with ridiculously fruity names and then, at long last, with fireworks in the sky and perfume in the air, they kiss. And then they kiss again. Then, after a few more whispered words and a double-page spread of a highly tasteful grope, they slip away to the nearest hotel to - ah - fill the time before the tech-guy hits the button to bring on the stylish fade-to-black. This is the way that things are supposed to happen. Or, well, it’s one of the ways that these things are supposed to happen, and if he’s honest he’d rather have tried something else, only the library girl didn’t have a piano that needed tuning or a leaky pipe to fix, and anyway he’d been decidedly tone-deaf ever since Ma tried to make him sing at the Festival of Fish. That just left the crowded room thing. Either way, it was perfect. He’d got the bar, sort of. He was pretty sure the only way Marty’s Magical Shack-House of Crabby Delights ever managed to sell anything other than tickets out was by plying the unfortunate souls who wandered in with copious amounts of Galbadian beer before showing them the menu, so there was definitely booze, and if it wasn’t exactly crowded (current population: two creepy trawler men with added barnacles, a decidedly drunken sailor and the aforementioned hot-legged girl) well, that’d just make it easier to meet a certain someone’s gaze. He was definitely a guy, and there was, in fact, a girl. It should have been perfect, only Zell was pretty sure that the guy’s not supposed to catch the girl in flagrante with a platter full of fruits de mer sucking crab juice off her fingers with an expression of rapturous, slack-jawed satisfaction that should really only be allowed if post-coital, and he was definitely sure that the girl was not supposed to be Quistis.
It wasn’t his fault, really. He’d only gone in to check the place out and scout ahead in preparation for his mission - Operation: Score a date with library girl - and he really hadn’t meant to stay, but then he’d spied this sexy set of ankles looking at him from one of the far back booths and he’d had to go over and check it out because he was on reconaissance and that meant investigating shit, especially shit like where the owners of sexy ankles hang out in crab-shacks-slash-bars, and it would have been fine if he hadn’t fallen over a ‘decorative’ lobster crate and landed face-first, eye-to-proverbial-eye with the slim-skinned ankles and looked up to find her, right little finger still slipped inside her mouth, staring down at him with an expression of mild, good-natured surprise that might better have been used on a talking dog. Then, of course, she’d seen just who her interloper was, and then her face had slipped from curious Quistis to guilty Quistis found with her hands on one of Cid’s Do Not Touch books or, sometimes, the cookie jar to oh Hyne, the Instructor’s gonna give us buttloads of homework Quistis before settling, finally, on the cool, neutral, all-purpose smileless face she used when she wanted you to go away, and he’d swallowed hard, but then she’d helped him up and said his name like who else would fall at my feet in the back of a crab shack and invited him to sit and really, to leave her alone with all that food would just have been impolite. This is how he wound up sitting across from Instructor Hot Ankles, watching as she cracked open crab claws with a little grey mallet, separated only by a forest of legs, some creepy-looking shellfish and the sneaking suspicion that he’d wandered into a really twisted fairy tale with the wrong sort of princess and far too many little beady eyes. He wasn’t complaining, though, especially since there was lobster to eat.
Anyway, it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t say no to food, it was Ma’s. In fact, all of it was Ma’s fault. She was the one who’d suggested he might like to catch himself a girl. She was the one who stuffed him full of the stories of her gloriously romantic evenings over sweet spiced shellfish and fine red wine. She was the one who told him to ‘always be prepared’. Stupid reconaissance. At least he didn’t seem to be in trouble...yet. The table was silent, though, silent like the shore was silent just before a storm, broken only by his dinner date’s rhythmic snapping of anthropod joints. He swallowed. Humour. Humour is good.
“So I heard you like crab cakes.”
“...Not really, no.”
Ulp. He never could tell when she was joking, and the sound of her breaking small and spicy limbs into teeny tiny pieces was starting to make him nervous. Invading Quistis’s privacy, however accidentally, was never good. He’d seen what she and Xu did to Trepies. Say something smart, dumbass.
“So, uh, I guess Siren finally got to you then, huh?”
Her eyes, eyes the colour of angry oceans and magic and, for all he knew, slow and agonising death, flittered up from her meal to cut straight through him even as her hands pointedly snapped an unfortunate crab in two, one eyebrow arched straight at him. Shit. He waved his hands in what he hopped was a placatory gesture, narrowly avoiding the pile of periwinkles stacked just to the right of his arm. She winced. Those winkles were so good...
“Hey, hey, don’t worry! It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone. Man, the first time I junctioned Cerberus? All I wanted to do was screw huntin’ Seifer and rip into a nice raw steak, and you should have seen what Eden did to Squall; seriously, fried cactuar with ketchup, hot sauce, chocolate and fruit? Man. Oh, and I heard that when Nida used Siren he wound up eating sixteen clams and two lobsters, even though he hates fish, and he swelled up like a -“
“Zell.”
He stopped. Eyeing him across the mass of dead meat and delicately settling her mallet on her plate, she wiped her fingers (dammit!) on a nearby napkin and folded her arms across her waist, pressing back into her chair as she watched him carefully.
“Yeah, Quisty?”
“Zell, what makes you think this," - she waved a casually magnanimous hand over the remains of what must have been marine genocide - “has anything to do with Siren?”
He resisted the urge to scrub the back of his neck.
“Uh, y’know, seafood. It’s salty. And, uh, Siren likes fish, and I know you like salmon an’ snapper and that weird shrimpy stuff -“
“Scampi.”
“Yeah, that, ‘cos you’re always ordering it, but that stuff’s pretty normal and some of this shit is just plain wei - ”
He took a moment to glance between a purple-shelled crab with seven green eyes and the hurt expression emanating from across the table.
Crack. Snap.
“-unusual,” he finished, lamely.
She eyed him for a moment, then returned to tapping her crab claw.
“I’m not junctioned, Zell, not with Siren or Leviathan or anyone else with a predilection for sea food, and I’ve certainly never given in to the cravings of a GF. I like crab, Zell.”
“Oh. Great.”
She looked down, then, but her voice was tight and he could see that her forehead was rumpled in the same way as the faces of the junior classmen girls that time he accidentally squished their sandcastle.
“And I don’t always have to eat salmon,” snap, crack, “or have dinner in fancy restaurants,” splack, crack, “or eat meals with seven kinds of fork, “ squealch, splarsh, “or order dull fish. Sometimes, I don’t want to dine. Sometimes, I like to eat crab. Sometimes, all I want to do is take my mallet, crack open a lobster and eat.”
She punctuated her point by neatly snapping a fourth crab in two and deftly skewering the meat with a sharp, blue-handled knife, popping it into her mouth.
Oh. Right. So, Quistis was having a bender, only she was saying it with shellfish rather than, say, his own favourite cocktail of root beer, hot dogs, nutty ice cream and the Girl Next Door Live Action Film. He looked at her properly then, looked at her for the first time that day or maybe that month or maybe even for the first time in a long long time. She was wearing civvies, civvies that were neither peach nor black but powder blue, a roll neck sweater pulled over a sleek brown skirt topped off with a pair of red shoes, slip ons, which, really, were the whole reason he was in this mess in the first place. Hynedamned ankles. She was half-sitting, half-teetering on her chair, her head ducked low and her face a little flushed, what he could see of her throat doing a remarkably good job of matching the lobster tails.
She was embarassed. Ohhhhh, boy. But...but this was Quistis, he thought suddenly, completely unhelpfully and in a way he didn’t quite yet understand, this was really her, half curled in a chair and pink in the cheap yellow light, her hands soft and oiled with crab fat, her lips pressed together and her head shyly cocked, her poise completely and utterly undercut by the neatly stacked, colour-coordinated remains of seven dozen crabs. It was almost...cute.
“I’m sorry, Quis, I really didn’t mean to, you know....”
She was waving her hands at him, her skin glistening with the grease, grease that smelled really good and hey, he really should be paying attention to something other than licking her fingers and oh, Hyne is she giggling? The sound bubbled out of her from behind her hand, her shoulders quivering as she laughed.
“No, Zell, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have...it was rude of me. Oh, you must think I’m very strange.”
She looked at the table then, as though noticing the carnage for the first time, pressing her hand against her mouth.
“It isn’t very dignified, is it?”
She was looking at him, he knew, looking out from the edge of her eyeline to check his face for signs of...what, exactly? Reproach? Disgust? Mockery? She made a slightly forlorn attempt to tidy up the shells, pawing at them half-heartedly with one hand, her eyes still cast down. He cleared his throat and shrugged.
“They’re just crabs, Quisty. I didn’t know you liked ‘em so much.”
“Mmm.”
She looked past him for a moment, her eyes unfocused behind the slender silver frames of her glasses.
“I suppose it must be that it reminds me of Matron’s. Whenever I’m - well, whenever I feel the need, I come down here, order a crab platter and take some time to think. It’s very...cathartic.” She didn’t feel the need to share the fact that, as cadets, she and Xu had liked to pretend that they were breaking the fingers of the handsy fitness instructor who liked to grope their butts.
“That’s really nice, Quisty.”
He meant it. She looked up at him, letting the knife loll easily onto her plate, and for a moment her eyes weren’t storms or seas but something more like blueberries and motorcycle grease and wow, did he like mechs and muffins. She coughed.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
What was he doing there, anyway? There had been a reason, he was sure, but his brain was feeling a little muzzy, what with the smell of the spices and the fascinating, glistening trails of juice that the meat had left on her fat bottom lip and the way she was smiling with a gentle mouth and really, he remembered the ankles but not much before-
“Zell?”
“Mrflah....um...Ma! Yeah! Ma, um, wanted me to, y’know, check this place out for...um..her birthday! Ma wants to come here for her birthday!”
“Oh, really? That’s surprising. I though Mrs Dincht’s birthday wasn’t until November...”
He screwed up his eyes in an effort to squeeze some plausibility out of the back of his brain.
“It’s, um, her second birthday! Um, y’know, cos not everyone can come in the winter and, um, you’re invited! Yes, she said that I should invite you!” Basic Espionage Class 004: Rule Six - Distract the target to avoid unwanted discovery. Thank you, Instructor Trepe.
She glanced up, evidently surprised and not a little incredulous.
“That’s...nice. Thank you, Zell, I’d be...happy...to come.”
She tried not to groan. Parties. She liked Mrs Dincht, at least, and there wasn’t likely to be any loud music or drunken dancing if she was in charge, so, well, it might be fun, and anyway it was hard to refuse Zell when he was making that face, the face of a hungry puppy looking at an almost maliciously meaty bone. She returned to her claw as he slowly opened one eye, her acquiescence apparently making him to think that she’d been replaced with Selphie, or, at best, some kind of disturbing, party-friendly clone.
“Oh. Great. Great!”
Snap. Crack. He picked up one of the purple crabs and peered at it nervously.
“Hey, Quis...”
“Mmm?”
“You don’t always have to...come and talk to the crabs, y’know?”
She laughed, her eyebrows arcing upwards quizzically.
"Excuse me?"
“I just mean, if somethin’s bumming you out, or you wanna shout or yell or beat somethin’ up, you can always talk to me, or Selph, or any one of us, you know? You don’t...you don’t need to do everything on your own.”
She barked a short laugh, briskly running a clean cloth over her hands and wetting her lips, turning away from him.
“Thank you for your concern, Zell, but I’m really not in need of any form of hand-holding. I am not here, as you so elegantly put it, to ‘talk to the crabs’. It's just a periodic craving, that’s all.”
She was closing up again, he could see, skittering back inside the hardness of her eyes, pulling her features into line with the decorum she wanted him to see, leaning sideways out over the edge of her chair, scanning the room for the right man to pay, starting to stand up, she was hurt, she was leaving again and in far more ways than one, she was leaving, she was leaving-
“Quistis, wait!”
And oh, great, now she was scarlet and mad because he really hadn’t meant to yell and everyone was staring and hey, when did he grab her wrist and oh, Hyne, her heart rate really shouldn’t be that high unless she’s going to Limit Break and shitshitshitshitshit-
Her eyes were huge, then, the heady mix of rage and fear and wow, his hands are soft making her pupils splay and her skin feel hot and he was staring at her face and really, really, she really should sit down because it’s very dizzy in here, and why hadn’t she noticed that before?
She dropped steadily back into her seat, her eyes fixed on him, and tried to ignore the chuckles coming from the sea dogs at the bar. She took a breath. He’s still holding the crab. Why is he holding a crab? Why is he holding my hand?
“Gyuh...”
She wetted her lips, her mouth annoyingly dry, her voice soft.
“What is it, Zell?”
Oh yes, he thought, words, I remember those. I’d like some now, please.
He dropped her hand to scrub the back of his neck with a violent fist, and scrubbed harder when his brain remembered that he hadn’t needed to let go because he had another perfectly good hand still clamped around a creepy purple crab that was somehow managing to glare at both of them at the same time. She was waiting, he knew, her arms clamped across her chest and eyes still big like a very sexy stoner and her teeth worrying at the edge of her lip and please, Hyne, don’t let me stuff this up.
“Uh....how...how do you eat this kind of crab?”
She blinked.
“I’m sorry, what?”
He waggled the crab at her lamely, its horrible little legs gristling and hissing as they bounced up and down. She could always be distracted by the chance to teach new things (he hoped).
“This...crab. How do you eat it? I’ve never had one before and it looks...uh, y’know, really good.”
“You’re asking me how to eat a Trabian spider crab.”
“Y-yeah!”
“Zell, you’ve lived in Balamb for twelve years, and you’re telling me that you’ve never eaten a Trabian spider crab?”
She was making that face, the face he remembered from their childhood, her eyes narrowed and her lips pulled taut over her teeth, the face that said I don’t think you’re this dumb and you’d better not be trying to placate me or I’ll make you hurt real bad and could usually be soothed only by the promise of chocolate or, in a pinch, the chance at a good education. He stared right back at her, and for a moment tension sparked between them as he stared her incredulity down because hell, the crab looked vile, but he wasn’t gonna let her go.
Her lips twitched once - the start of a conspiratorial smile.
“Alright,” she said, and with a flourish and a jab she showed him how to crack the shell, how to find out every secret place, and he ate crab after disgusting, soapy crab until the yolk of the evening sun dribbled down beneath the waters of the sea and the night threw shadows into the hollows of her face and her eyes danced like fireflies and she smiled, his hand on her hand all the way, and then he held on just a little bit more.
For: fudebusho
Medium: Fanfic, penguin poop
Request(s): Zell/Quistis
Fandom(s): Final Fantasy VIII
Characters/Pairings: Zell/Quistis
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Feedback: Mildly constructive, please, and keep in mind that there's stylistic experimentation going on here. I like my crit like I like my lego; pretty, brightly coloured, and shapely enough that with it you can learn how to build something new.
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 2987, and the hundred or so words I yelled at the screen
Summary: Zell catches Quistis in the act.
Notes: I hope you that you enjoy this! Since you left the prompt wide open, I went for something comic and played around with the style. The pairing isn't particularly strong, but I hope this is at least a little like something you were looking for.
So a guy walks into a bar and there’s a girl - a hot girl, the kind with legs that go on forever and eyes like moonbeams and sparkles and shit - and their eyes meet. He sees her, and she sees him. They glance across a crowded room. They talk. They smile. They smoulder over funny-coloured drinks with ridiculously fruity names and then, at long last, with fireworks in the sky and perfume in the air, they kiss. And then they kiss again. Then, after a few more whispered words and a double-page spread of a highly tasteful grope, they slip away to the nearest hotel to - ah - fill the time before the tech-guy hits the button to bring on the stylish fade-to-black. This is the way that things are supposed to happen. Or, well, it’s one of the ways that these things are supposed to happen, and if he’s honest he’d rather have tried something else, only the library girl didn’t have a piano that needed tuning or a leaky pipe to fix, and anyway he’d been decidedly tone-deaf ever since Ma tried to make him sing at the Festival of Fish. That just left the crowded room thing. Either way, it was perfect. He’d got the bar, sort of. He was pretty sure the only way Marty’s Magical Shack-House of Crabby Delights ever managed to sell anything other than tickets out was by plying the unfortunate souls who wandered in with copious amounts of Galbadian beer before showing them the menu, so there was definitely booze, and if it wasn’t exactly crowded (current population: two creepy trawler men with added barnacles, a decidedly drunken sailor and the aforementioned hot-legged girl) well, that’d just make it easier to meet a certain someone’s gaze. He was definitely a guy, and there was, in fact, a girl. It should have been perfect, only Zell was pretty sure that the guy’s not supposed to catch the girl in flagrante with a platter full of fruits de mer sucking crab juice off her fingers with an expression of rapturous, slack-jawed satisfaction that should really only be allowed if post-coital, and he was definitely sure that the girl was not supposed to be Quistis.
It wasn’t his fault, really. He’d only gone in to check the place out and scout ahead in preparation for his mission - Operation: Score a date with library girl - and he really hadn’t meant to stay, but then he’d spied this sexy set of ankles looking at him from one of the far back booths and he’d had to go over and check it out because he was on reconaissance and that meant investigating shit, especially shit like where the owners of sexy ankles hang out in crab-shacks-slash-bars, and it would have been fine if he hadn’t fallen over a ‘decorative’ lobster crate and landed face-first, eye-to-proverbial-eye with the slim-skinned ankles and looked up to find her, right little finger still slipped inside her mouth, staring down at him with an expression of mild, good-natured surprise that might better have been used on a talking dog. Then, of course, she’d seen just who her interloper was, and then her face had slipped from curious Quistis to guilty Quistis found with her hands on one of Cid’s Do Not Touch books or, sometimes, the cookie jar to oh Hyne, the Instructor’s gonna give us buttloads of homework Quistis before settling, finally, on the cool, neutral, all-purpose smileless face she used when she wanted you to go away, and he’d swallowed hard, but then she’d helped him up and said his name like who else would fall at my feet in the back of a crab shack and invited him to sit and really, to leave her alone with all that food would just have been impolite. This is how he wound up sitting across from Instructor Hot Ankles, watching as she cracked open crab claws with a little grey mallet, separated only by a forest of legs, some creepy-looking shellfish and the sneaking suspicion that he’d wandered into a really twisted fairy tale with the wrong sort of princess and far too many little beady eyes. He wasn’t complaining, though, especially since there was lobster to eat.
Anyway, it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t say no to food, it was Ma’s. In fact, all of it was Ma’s fault. She was the one who’d suggested he might like to catch himself a girl. She was the one who stuffed him full of the stories of her gloriously romantic evenings over sweet spiced shellfish and fine red wine. She was the one who told him to ‘always be prepared’. Stupid reconaissance. At least he didn’t seem to be in trouble...yet. The table was silent, though, silent like the shore was silent just before a storm, broken only by his dinner date’s rhythmic snapping of anthropod joints. He swallowed. Humour. Humour is good.
“So I heard you like crab cakes.”
“...Not really, no.”
Ulp. He never could tell when she was joking, and the sound of her breaking small and spicy limbs into teeny tiny pieces was starting to make him nervous. Invading Quistis’s privacy, however accidentally, was never good. He’d seen what she and Xu did to Trepies. Say something smart, dumbass.
“So, uh, I guess Siren finally got to you then, huh?”
Her eyes, eyes the colour of angry oceans and magic and, for all he knew, slow and agonising death, flittered up from her meal to cut straight through him even as her hands pointedly snapped an unfortunate crab in two, one eyebrow arched straight at him. Shit. He waved his hands in what he hopped was a placatory gesture, narrowly avoiding the pile of periwinkles stacked just to the right of his arm. She winced. Those winkles were so good...
“Hey, hey, don’t worry! It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone. Man, the first time I junctioned Cerberus? All I wanted to do was screw huntin’ Seifer and rip into a nice raw steak, and you should have seen what Eden did to Squall; seriously, fried cactuar with ketchup, hot sauce, chocolate and fruit? Man. Oh, and I heard that when Nida used Siren he wound up eating sixteen clams and two lobsters, even though he hates fish, and he swelled up like a -“
“Zell.”
He stopped. Eyeing him across the mass of dead meat and delicately settling her mallet on her plate, she wiped her fingers (dammit!) on a nearby napkin and folded her arms across her waist, pressing back into her chair as she watched him carefully.
“Yeah, Quisty?”
“Zell, what makes you think this," - she waved a casually magnanimous hand over the remains of what must have been marine genocide - “has anything to do with Siren?”
He resisted the urge to scrub the back of his neck.
“Uh, y’know, seafood. It’s salty. And, uh, Siren likes fish, and I know you like salmon an’ snapper and that weird shrimpy stuff -“
“Scampi.”
“Yeah, that, ‘cos you’re always ordering it, but that stuff’s pretty normal and some of this shit is just plain wei - ”
He took a moment to glance between a purple-shelled crab with seven green eyes and the hurt expression emanating from across the table.
Crack. Snap.
“-unusual,” he finished, lamely.
She eyed him for a moment, then returned to tapping her crab claw.
“I’m not junctioned, Zell, not with Siren or Leviathan or anyone else with a predilection for sea food, and I’ve certainly never given in to the cravings of a GF. I like crab, Zell.”
“Oh. Great.”
She looked down, then, but her voice was tight and he could see that her forehead was rumpled in the same way as the faces of the junior classmen girls that time he accidentally squished their sandcastle.
“And I don’t always have to eat salmon,” snap, crack, “or have dinner in fancy restaurants,” splack, crack, “or eat meals with seven kinds of fork, “ squealch, splarsh, “or order dull fish. Sometimes, I don’t want to dine. Sometimes, I like to eat crab. Sometimes, all I want to do is take my mallet, crack open a lobster and eat.”
She punctuated her point by neatly snapping a fourth crab in two and deftly skewering the meat with a sharp, blue-handled knife, popping it into her mouth.
Oh. Right. So, Quistis was having a bender, only she was saying it with shellfish rather than, say, his own favourite cocktail of root beer, hot dogs, nutty ice cream and the Girl Next Door Live Action Film. He looked at her properly then, looked at her for the first time that day or maybe that month or maybe even for the first time in a long long time. She was wearing civvies, civvies that were neither peach nor black but powder blue, a roll neck sweater pulled over a sleek brown skirt topped off with a pair of red shoes, slip ons, which, really, were the whole reason he was in this mess in the first place. Hynedamned ankles. She was half-sitting, half-teetering on her chair, her head ducked low and her face a little flushed, what he could see of her throat doing a remarkably good job of matching the lobster tails.
She was embarassed. Ohhhhh, boy. But...but this was Quistis, he thought suddenly, completely unhelpfully and in a way he didn’t quite yet understand, this was really her, half curled in a chair and pink in the cheap yellow light, her hands soft and oiled with crab fat, her lips pressed together and her head shyly cocked, her poise completely and utterly undercut by the neatly stacked, colour-coordinated remains of seven dozen crabs. It was almost...cute.
“I’m sorry, Quis, I really didn’t mean to, you know....”
She was waving her hands at him, her skin glistening with the grease, grease that smelled really good and hey, he really should be paying attention to something other than licking her fingers and oh, Hyne is she giggling? The sound bubbled out of her from behind her hand, her shoulders quivering as she laughed.
“No, Zell, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have...it was rude of me. Oh, you must think I’m very strange.”
She looked at the table then, as though noticing the carnage for the first time, pressing her hand against her mouth.
“It isn’t very dignified, is it?”
She was looking at him, he knew, looking out from the edge of her eyeline to check his face for signs of...what, exactly? Reproach? Disgust? Mockery? She made a slightly forlorn attempt to tidy up the shells, pawing at them half-heartedly with one hand, her eyes still cast down. He cleared his throat and shrugged.
“They’re just crabs, Quisty. I didn’t know you liked ‘em so much.”
“Mmm.”
She looked past him for a moment, her eyes unfocused behind the slender silver frames of her glasses.
“I suppose it must be that it reminds me of Matron’s. Whenever I’m - well, whenever I feel the need, I come down here, order a crab platter and take some time to think. It’s very...cathartic.” She didn’t feel the need to share the fact that, as cadets, she and Xu had liked to pretend that they were breaking the fingers of the handsy fitness instructor who liked to grope their butts.
“That’s really nice, Quisty.”
He meant it. She looked up at him, letting the knife loll easily onto her plate, and for a moment her eyes weren’t storms or seas but something more like blueberries and motorcycle grease and wow, did he like mechs and muffins. She coughed.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
What was he doing there, anyway? There had been a reason, he was sure, but his brain was feeling a little muzzy, what with the smell of the spices and the fascinating, glistening trails of juice that the meat had left on her fat bottom lip and the way she was smiling with a gentle mouth and really, he remembered the ankles but not much before-
“Zell?”
“Mrflah....um...Ma! Yeah! Ma, um, wanted me to, y’know, check this place out for...um..her birthday! Ma wants to come here for her birthday!”
“Oh, really? That’s surprising. I though Mrs Dincht’s birthday wasn’t until November...”
He screwed up his eyes in an effort to squeeze some plausibility out of the back of his brain.
“It’s, um, her second birthday! Um, y’know, cos not everyone can come in the winter and, um, you’re invited! Yes, she said that I should invite you!” Basic Espionage Class 004: Rule Six - Distract the target to avoid unwanted discovery. Thank you, Instructor Trepe.
She glanced up, evidently surprised and not a little incredulous.
“That’s...nice. Thank you, Zell, I’d be...happy...to come.”
She tried not to groan. Parties. She liked Mrs Dincht, at least, and there wasn’t likely to be any loud music or drunken dancing if she was in charge, so, well, it might be fun, and anyway it was hard to refuse Zell when he was making that face, the face of a hungry puppy looking at an almost maliciously meaty bone. She returned to her claw as he slowly opened one eye, her acquiescence apparently making him to think that she’d been replaced with Selphie, or, at best, some kind of disturbing, party-friendly clone.
“Oh. Great. Great!”
Snap. Crack. He picked up one of the purple crabs and peered at it nervously.
“Hey, Quis...”
“Mmm?”
“You don’t always have to...come and talk to the crabs, y’know?”
She laughed, her eyebrows arcing upwards quizzically.
"Excuse me?"
“I just mean, if somethin’s bumming you out, or you wanna shout or yell or beat somethin’ up, you can always talk to me, or Selph, or any one of us, you know? You don’t...you don’t need to do everything on your own.”
She barked a short laugh, briskly running a clean cloth over her hands and wetting her lips, turning away from him.
“Thank you for your concern, Zell, but I’m really not in need of any form of hand-holding. I am not here, as you so elegantly put it, to ‘talk to the crabs’. It's just a periodic craving, that’s all.”
She was closing up again, he could see, skittering back inside the hardness of her eyes, pulling her features into line with the decorum she wanted him to see, leaning sideways out over the edge of her chair, scanning the room for the right man to pay, starting to stand up, she was hurt, she was leaving again and in far more ways than one, she was leaving, she was leaving-
“Quistis, wait!”
And oh, great, now she was scarlet and mad because he really hadn’t meant to yell and everyone was staring and hey, when did he grab her wrist and oh, Hyne, her heart rate really shouldn’t be that high unless she’s going to Limit Break and shitshitshitshitshit-
Her eyes were huge, then, the heady mix of rage and fear and wow, his hands are soft making her pupils splay and her skin feel hot and he was staring at her face and really, really, she really should sit down because it’s very dizzy in here, and why hadn’t she noticed that before?
She dropped steadily back into her seat, her eyes fixed on him, and tried to ignore the chuckles coming from the sea dogs at the bar. She took a breath. He’s still holding the crab. Why is he holding a crab? Why is he holding my hand?
“Gyuh...”
She wetted her lips, her mouth annoyingly dry, her voice soft.
“What is it, Zell?”
Oh yes, he thought, words, I remember those. I’d like some now, please.
He dropped her hand to scrub the back of his neck with a violent fist, and scrubbed harder when his brain remembered that he hadn’t needed to let go because he had another perfectly good hand still clamped around a creepy purple crab that was somehow managing to glare at both of them at the same time. She was waiting, he knew, her arms clamped across her chest and eyes still big like a very sexy stoner and her teeth worrying at the edge of her lip and please, Hyne, don’t let me stuff this up.
“Uh....how...how do you eat this kind of crab?”
She blinked.
“I’m sorry, what?”
He waggled the crab at her lamely, its horrible little legs gristling and hissing as they bounced up and down. She could always be distracted by the chance to teach new things (he hoped).
“This...crab. How do you eat it? I’ve never had one before and it looks...uh, y’know, really good.”
“You’re asking me how to eat a Trabian spider crab.”
“Y-yeah!”
“Zell, you’ve lived in Balamb for twelve years, and you’re telling me that you’ve never eaten a Trabian spider crab?”
She was making that face, the face he remembered from their childhood, her eyes narrowed and her lips pulled taut over her teeth, the face that said I don’t think you’re this dumb and you’d better not be trying to placate me or I’ll make you hurt real bad and could usually be soothed only by the promise of chocolate or, in a pinch, the chance at a good education. He stared right back at her, and for a moment tension sparked between them as he stared her incredulity down because hell, the crab looked vile, but he wasn’t gonna let her go.
Her lips twitched once - the start of a conspiratorial smile.
“Alright,” she said, and with a flourish and a jab she showed him how to crack the shell, how to find out every secret place, and he ate crab after disgusting, soapy crab until the yolk of the evening sun dribbled down beneath the waters of the sea and the night threw shadows into the hollows of her face and her eyes danced like fireflies and she smiled, his hand on her hand all the way, and then he held on just a little bit more.