Fanfiction: Wasteland (Final Fantasy VIII, Squall/Zell)
I cannot believe how hard it is to write Squall/Zell fanfiction. It's a pairing that makes perfect sense! And yet it's impossible to get these two together, even if you strand them together more completely than two people have ever been stranded.
Anyway, here's a fic for the first pairing I ever actively shipped.
Title: Wasteland
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Squall/Zell
Wordcount: 2,500
Summary: After defeating Ultimecia, Squall finds himself in a wasteland. He isn't alone.
A sound. Footsteps, breaking into a run. Squall whips around - if there are other people in this wasteland, they must have come from somewhere, there must be some kind of civilisation-
He knows what he’s seeing, but he can’t process it. Zell died in the battle against Ultimecia. But Zell is here, charging towards him across the cracked ground.
You’re alive, Squall wants to say, or are you real?
“Zell,” he says, instead.
“Squall!” Zell throws his arms around Squall in a quick hug, which Squall wasn’t expecting but is prepared to tolerate. It makes it a little easier to believe he’s not just imagining things, at least; Zell is warm, he’s solid. “Oh, man, am I glad to see you. Where the hell are we? What happened?”
They’re both questions Squall wouldn’t mind knowing the answer to himself. He takes a moment to compose himself, watching Zell catch his breath. He’s alive.
“What do you remember?” Squall asks, when he can trust his own voice.
“Uh, pretty sure the sorceress knocked me out cold,” Zell says. “I come to and I’m in this, uh, this weird wasteland.” He gestures around them. “I was actually kinda scared you guys had forgotten me.”
“You disappeared while you were unconscious,” Squall says. “We saw your body disintegrate.” Maybe he shouldn’t say this. “I thought you were dead.”
Zell raises his eyebrows. There’s a moment of silence before he speaks. “Uh, wow.”
Can he be sure Zell isn’t dead? Warm and solid, maybe, but the ground feels just as solid beneath Squall’s feet, and this place somehow doesn’t feel real to him.
“So... did the same thing happen to you?” Zell asks.
“I don’t know,” Squall says. “I thought we defeated her.” But here he is, wherever this is. The same place Zell ended up after losing the battle. It doesn’t seem like a good sign. “Maybe that wasn’t enough to stop time compression.”
“Damn,” Zell mutters. “I guess we might be screwed? I’ve been tryin’ to find a way out of this place, but it all just looks the same.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Man, I’m glad you’re here, at least.”
“I don’t know how to get out either,” Squall points out.
“Well, yeah,” Zell says. “But you’re still here, right? That’s a lot better than nothing.”
It doesn’t sound right. It’s bad to be stranded here; it’s worse to be stranded here with Zell, because that means they’re both in danger.
But, even if they’re not safe here, he guesses he’s glad to know Zell’s still alive. For now, if nothing else.
-
Walking doesn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. They might not even be moving in the right direction. According to their survival training, they should be heading downhill, but there doesn’t seem to be a downhill here; the ground undulates a little, but it’s more or less level all the way to the horizon.
They keep walking anyway. What options do they have?
Squall calls a short halt eventually. It feels dangerous to stop moving; they need to get out of this place while they can still walk. But, if they take a moment to rest when they need it, they might ultimately cover more ground.
Nothing to sit or lean on here. He lies on the ground, eyes closed and jacket under his head, until he hears a noise and sits up.
Zell is sparring with shadows. Not that there’s much in the way of light and shadow here, in this featureless landscape under a dead grey sky.
But Zell’s shadowboxing anyway, and there’s something reassuring about it. The well-practised motions, the rustle of his clothes, the quick tap of his shoes on the dry ground. It feels like something living and familiar in the midst of all this nothingness.
“You should conserve your energy,” Squall says. “We don’t know how far we might need to walk.”
Or what direction they need to walk in, or what time period they’re in, or whether there’s any civilisation to be reached at all. He keeps it to himself.
Zell falters, falls to a stop. “Oh, uh, guess you’re right.”
He sits down. The dense air presses in around them, silent and foreboding.
Squall lies down again, replaying Zell’s movements in his mind.
-
“Do you think the others are in this place, too?” Zell asks, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice, when they’re on the move again.
It’s hard to know what to hope for. Squall wants to see the others; he wants some confirmation that they’re still alive. But how long will any of them survive here?
“No way of knowing,” Squall says.
-
There’s nowhere to go. They’ve reached the edge of the world. Squall stares down into the mist.
“Shit,” Zell breathes.
“Stay away from the edge,” Squall says, automatically.
There’s no point in saying it; they’re going to die here either way. But he says it anyway.
-
They make a half-hearted effort to follow the edge, see if it’s a chasm they can cross over. But it quickly becomes clear that the edge runs the entire way around. The vast desert has somehow narrowed down to a little island in the dimming light, surrounded by nothing but fog.
Squall isn’t sure there’s anything below them. If they fell, he’s half-convinced they’d just keep falling.
They sit side by side, looking at the edge. Just the two of them, alone in the emptiness. Walking seemed like a hopeless endeavour to begin with, but now they don’t even have that. When they didn’t know the situation for certain, at least they could pretend they might eventually get somewhere.
“What’re you thinking?” Zell asks.
Squall looks over at him. “Why?”
Zell shrugs. “I don’t know. I feel like... if we can’t be honest right now, where can we be honest, y’know? It’s just us here.”
Talking breaks the silence, but it feels like the silence settles back over them as soon as they’ve finished speaking, thicker and heavier than before.
“So what are you thinking?” Zell asks, again.
Leviathan is still here; Squall can feel her in his mind. They might not die of thirst, at least.
But food is another matter. There’s nothing here but cracked earth.
Hunger is already starting to set in, a persistent scratching at the edges of his stomach.
Squall has known for a long time that he might die in battle. He’s always expected his death to be brutal, but he expected it to be sudden, too. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he might die slowly.
“I’m just trying to stay focused,” he says.
Whatever there is to stay focused on, now.
More silence. Squall’s always preferred silence to talking, but it doesn’t feel right when Zell’s so quiet. Just sitting there, looking at Squall.
“What?” Squall asks.
Zell clears his throat. “Just thought maybe you were wondering what I was thinking.”
It doesn’t seem like a mystery. They’re stranded in an environment they won’t be able to survive for long, and it’s unclear whether their victory over Ultimecia will actually undo time compression for the rest of the world. What else would either of them be thinking about?
Not really doesn’t seem like the right answer. He doesn’t say anything.
“I’m glad we’re friends,” Zell says. He rolls his shoulders, awkwardly. “I just wanted to say.”
Maybe it would be better if they weren’t. If they’d never met after the orphanage, one or both of them might not be in this void, facing down death.
“I’m... glad I know you, too,” Squall says, after a moment.
“And...” Zell hesitates. “I don’t know. I always kind of wanted to get to know you better. I guess maybe we won’t have the chance, now.”
There’s a long pause.
“Why did you join Garden?” Squall asks.
“Wait,” Zell says. “Wait, you want to know more about me?”
Squall hates it when people do this. Everyone always wants him to open up, ask questions, act more friendly. And then he tries, and they act like he’s broken some kind of rule.
Not much point letting it get to him now.
“It’s not important,” he says. “I was just wondering. A lot of us had nowhere else to go. You had a home already.”
Zell lets out a breath, looking up at the dense grey sky. “Uh, I don’t really remember. I think... there were some kids I knew there, maybe? I-” He breaks off, abruptly. “Uh, wow. I guess it must’ve been you guys.”
That hadn’t crossed Squall’s mind. Before Zell became a cadet, he wouldn’t have used GFs. He tries to think back to his first meeting with Zell at Garden, but it’s a blank in his mind.
“Did we remember you?” he asks.
Zell shakes his head. “I think you’d already forgotten. I was pretty upset.”
So Zell joined Garden because of him, at least partly. It seems like, no matter what lines of causality Squall follows back from this moment, they all tell him the same thing: if it weren’t for him, Zell wouldn’t be waiting to die in this place.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Zell shrugs. “I mean, you had Shiva eating your memories. It’s not like you could’ve helped it.”
That’s not what Squall was apologising for, exactly. But he doesn’t want to articulate what he actually is apologising for, so he guesses he’ll leave it alone.
The world warps.
“Whoa!” Zell has tensed up next to him, sitting up straighter. “What’s goin’ on?”
Squall is
Squall is dancing with Rinoa. He’s
Squall is dancing with Rinoa. He’s struggling with the steps, but she won’t let him
struggling with the steps, but
“Squall?” Zell asks, his voice spiking with terror.
The music catches and repeats, like a skipping record.
Squall is dancing with a girl. He doesn’t know her face, but she caught his eye across the room and
A girl catches his eye across the room. He doesn’t know her face. She raises a
There’s a girl pulling him onto the dance floor. She doesn’t have a face. She
The music catches and repeats and repeats and repeats.
“Squall, what the hell, are you seein’ this? Are you there?”
The voice is the only thing that’s not skipping. It feels like something solid in the midst of everything falling apart.
Squall reaches out for the voice.
Rinoa takes his hand and puts it on her waist, smiles at him. She’s dissolving into the music.
But someone else takes his hand as well, someone seizes it and grips it, pressing the leather into his skin. And that reminds Squall that he’s wearing gloves, not barehanded at a ball. The dance isn’t real. Or-
(Rinoa smiles at him and disappears, over and over again.)
The dance is real, it really happened, it’s important to him. But it isn’t what’s happening now.
He half-crawls blindly across the dusty earth, as the ballroom loops in front of his eyes. Someone catches his shoulder without letting go of his hand, pulls him clumsily into their lap.
It’s Zell. He’s with Zell, that’s his actual situation, and he needs to get back there. It’s not exactly a good situation, but being trapped in these warped echoes of his memories is worse. He feels like he’s drowning.
He curls up and closes his eyes. Everything is still repeating, but being able to feel that Zell’s there is a kind of anchor, something stable to remind him of what’s real.
-
Eventually, Squall becomes aware that things have stopped moving. He’s not sure how long ago they stabilised, exactly. It’s like the early-morning realisation he sometimes has that he’s awake, and that he’s been awake for a while.
He opens his eyes.
“Squall?” Zell asks, instantly. “Oh, man, that was - that was messed up. Was that time compression? Is it over?”
It takes a moment for Squall to process his situation: his hands tucked tightly against his own neck, his head on Zell’s thigh, their legs half-tangled together. He uncurls himself and sits up, shifting away.
Maybe not shifting away as far as he intended. His shin’s still pressed against Zell’s ankle, a physical reminder of where he is, just in case he’s yanked into the past again.
Zell is pale, his hair coming loose from its styling, the lines of his tattoo standing out starkly against his skin. Squall probably doesn’t look much better. At least the hunger’s gone for now; he can’t think of eating anything without feeling nauseous.
“Are you okay?” Zell asks.
Squall doesn’t answer.
Zell sighs. “Yeah, me neither.” He clasps his hands behind his neck. “I just... kept seein’ all the times I knew I was about to die, over and over again. Like the missile base, and D-District, and Ultimecia.”
And here, Squall thinks.
“I guess it was the same kind of thing for you?” Zell asks.
There were a lot of moments. But it seemed like he spent most of it trapped in that dance.
Maybe that’s better: being tangled in the echoes of a good memory, instead of a bad one. But it was twisted, it was wrong. He can’t think about that dance now.
“You helped,” Squall says. “Thanks.”
Zell’s eyes widen. He coughs awkwardly into his hand. “I mean, I was losin’ it too. Uh, but that’s good to hear.”
-
It’s hard to picture either of them getting much sleep. But they might as well make the effort.
It’s getting darker, getting colder. There’s no sun visible through the cloud, if that’s what’s covering the sky at all. Maybe there’s a sun out there, it’s setting, it’ll rise and they’ll have light again. Maybe there’s no sun in this place; maybe there’s just the light, dying away, and when it’s gone it’s gone.
Either way, they probably won’t have to worry about it for long.
“Ground’s pretty hard,” Zell says. “Uh, how about we use my jacket as a pillow and yours as a blanket?”
It makes sense. They’ll both be a little more comfortable, at least, and staying close will help to conserve body heat.
-
As predicted, Squall doesn’t sleep. Tense about the situation, tense about the possibility of being thrown back into time compression. Tense in ways he can’t place.
He lies there, his stomach gnawing at him, Zell breathing against his chest. Watching the sky for any sign that there might be a dawn again. He can’t judge how many hours it’s been.
Eventually, Zell stirs against him. “Squall,” he mumbles, and then, half-coherent, “Where are we?”
Squall isn’t prepared to answer that question.
Zell shifts back a little and reaches up to touch Squall’s face; he’s not wearing his gauntlets. Squall goes still at the touch; he wasn’t expecting it. There’s no moonlight here, and it’s hard to see anything in this darkness. Zell’s thumb is resting over his lips.
Zell kisses him. His mouth is warm and slow, the only living thing in this empty darkness.
Squall tries to keep breathing, tries to make sense of what’s happening. Maybe Zell’s still dreaming. Maybe Squall is dreaming.
But, whatever the situation, he hasn’t tried to move away.
He closes his eyes, although it makes no real difference.
They’re probably not going to live long enough to worry about this, either.
Anyway, here's a fic for the first pairing I ever actively shipped.
Title: Wasteland
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Squall/Zell
Wordcount: 2,500
Summary: After defeating Ultimecia, Squall finds himself in a wasteland. He isn't alone.
A sound. Footsteps, breaking into a run. Squall whips around - if there are other people in this wasteland, they must have come from somewhere, there must be some kind of civilisation-
He knows what he’s seeing, but he can’t process it. Zell died in the battle against Ultimecia. But Zell is here, charging towards him across the cracked ground.
You’re alive, Squall wants to say, or are you real?
“Zell,” he says, instead.
“Squall!” Zell throws his arms around Squall in a quick hug, which Squall wasn’t expecting but is prepared to tolerate. It makes it a little easier to believe he’s not just imagining things, at least; Zell is warm, he’s solid. “Oh, man, am I glad to see you. Where the hell are we? What happened?”
They’re both questions Squall wouldn’t mind knowing the answer to himself. He takes a moment to compose himself, watching Zell catch his breath. He’s alive.
“What do you remember?” Squall asks, when he can trust his own voice.
“Uh, pretty sure the sorceress knocked me out cold,” Zell says. “I come to and I’m in this, uh, this weird wasteland.” He gestures around them. “I was actually kinda scared you guys had forgotten me.”
“You disappeared while you were unconscious,” Squall says. “We saw your body disintegrate.” Maybe he shouldn’t say this. “I thought you were dead.”
Zell raises his eyebrows. There’s a moment of silence before he speaks. “Uh, wow.”
Can he be sure Zell isn’t dead? Warm and solid, maybe, but the ground feels just as solid beneath Squall’s feet, and this place somehow doesn’t feel real to him.
“So... did the same thing happen to you?” Zell asks.
“I don’t know,” Squall says. “I thought we defeated her.” But here he is, wherever this is. The same place Zell ended up after losing the battle. It doesn’t seem like a good sign. “Maybe that wasn’t enough to stop time compression.”
“Damn,” Zell mutters. “I guess we might be screwed? I’ve been tryin’ to find a way out of this place, but it all just looks the same.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Man, I’m glad you’re here, at least.”
“I don’t know how to get out either,” Squall points out.
“Well, yeah,” Zell says. “But you’re still here, right? That’s a lot better than nothing.”
It doesn’t sound right. It’s bad to be stranded here; it’s worse to be stranded here with Zell, because that means they’re both in danger.
But, even if they’re not safe here, he guesses he’s glad to know Zell’s still alive. For now, if nothing else.
-
Walking doesn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. They might not even be moving in the right direction. According to their survival training, they should be heading downhill, but there doesn’t seem to be a downhill here; the ground undulates a little, but it’s more or less level all the way to the horizon.
They keep walking anyway. What options do they have?
Squall calls a short halt eventually. It feels dangerous to stop moving; they need to get out of this place while they can still walk. But, if they take a moment to rest when they need it, they might ultimately cover more ground.
Nothing to sit or lean on here. He lies on the ground, eyes closed and jacket under his head, until he hears a noise and sits up.
Zell is sparring with shadows. Not that there’s much in the way of light and shadow here, in this featureless landscape under a dead grey sky.
But Zell’s shadowboxing anyway, and there’s something reassuring about it. The well-practised motions, the rustle of his clothes, the quick tap of his shoes on the dry ground. It feels like something living and familiar in the midst of all this nothingness.
“You should conserve your energy,” Squall says. “We don’t know how far we might need to walk.”
Or what direction they need to walk in, or what time period they’re in, or whether there’s any civilisation to be reached at all. He keeps it to himself.
Zell falters, falls to a stop. “Oh, uh, guess you’re right.”
He sits down. The dense air presses in around them, silent and foreboding.
Squall lies down again, replaying Zell’s movements in his mind.
-
“Do you think the others are in this place, too?” Zell asks, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice, when they’re on the move again.
It’s hard to know what to hope for. Squall wants to see the others; he wants some confirmation that they’re still alive. But how long will any of them survive here?
“No way of knowing,” Squall says.
-
There’s nowhere to go. They’ve reached the edge of the world. Squall stares down into the mist.
“Shit,” Zell breathes.
“Stay away from the edge,” Squall says, automatically.
There’s no point in saying it; they’re going to die here either way. But he says it anyway.
-
They make a half-hearted effort to follow the edge, see if it’s a chasm they can cross over. But it quickly becomes clear that the edge runs the entire way around. The vast desert has somehow narrowed down to a little island in the dimming light, surrounded by nothing but fog.
Squall isn’t sure there’s anything below them. If they fell, he’s half-convinced they’d just keep falling.
They sit side by side, looking at the edge. Just the two of them, alone in the emptiness. Walking seemed like a hopeless endeavour to begin with, but now they don’t even have that. When they didn’t know the situation for certain, at least they could pretend they might eventually get somewhere.
“What’re you thinking?” Zell asks.
Squall looks over at him. “Why?”
Zell shrugs. “I don’t know. I feel like... if we can’t be honest right now, where can we be honest, y’know? It’s just us here.”
Talking breaks the silence, but it feels like the silence settles back over them as soon as they’ve finished speaking, thicker and heavier than before.
“So what are you thinking?” Zell asks, again.
Leviathan is still here; Squall can feel her in his mind. They might not die of thirst, at least.
But food is another matter. There’s nothing here but cracked earth.
Hunger is already starting to set in, a persistent scratching at the edges of his stomach.
Squall has known for a long time that he might die in battle. He’s always expected his death to be brutal, but he expected it to be sudden, too. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he might die slowly.
“I’m just trying to stay focused,” he says.
Whatever there is to stay focused on, now.
More silence. Squall’s always preferred silence to talking, but it doesn’t feel right when Zell’s so quiet. Just sitting there, looking at Squall.
“What?” Squall asks.
Zell clears his throat. “Just thought maybe you were wondering what I was thinking.”
It doesn’t seem like a mystery. They’re stranded in an environment they won’t be able to survive for long, and it’s unclear whether their victory over Ultimecia will actually undo time compression for the rest of the world. What else would either of them be thinking about?
Not really doesn’t seem like the right answer. He doesn’t say anything.
“I’m glad we’re friends,” Zell says. He rolls his shoulders, awkwardly. “I just wanted to say.”
Maybe it would be better if they weren’t. If they’d never met after the orphanage, one or both of them might not be in this void, facing down death.
“I’m... glad I know you, too,” Squall says, after a moment.
“And...” Zell hesitates. “I don’t know. I always kind of wanted to get to know you better. I guess maybe we won’t have the chance, now.”
There’s a long pause.
“Why did you join Garden?” Squall asks.
“Wait,” Zell says. “Wait, you want to know more about me?”
Squall hates it when people do this. Everyone always wants him to open up, ask questions, act more friendly. And then he tries, and they act like he’s broken some kind of rule.
Not much point letting it get to him now.
“It’s not important,” he says. “I was just wondering. A lot of us had nowhere else to go. You had a home already.”
Zell lets out a breath, looking up at the dense grey sky. “Uh, I don’t really remember. I think... there were some kids I knew there, maybe? I-” He breaks off, abruptly. “Uh, wow. I guess it must’ve been you guys.”
That hadn’t crossed Squall’s mind. Before Zell became a cadet, he wouldn’t have used GFs. He tries to think back to his first meeting with Zell at Garden, but it’s a blank in his mind.
“Did we remember you?” he asks.
Zell shakes his head. “I think you’d already forgotten. I was pretty upset.”
So Zell joined Garden because of him, at least partly. It seems like, no matter what lines of causality Squall follows back from this moment, they all tell him the same thing: if it weren’t for him, Zell wouldn’t be waiting to die in this place.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Zell shrugs. “I mean, you had Shiva eating your memories. It’s not like you could’ve helped it.”
That’s not what Squall was apologising for, exactly. But he doesn’t want to articulate what he actually is apologising for, so he guesses he’ll leave it alone.
The world warps.
“Whoa!” Zell has tensed up next to him, sitting up straighter. “What’s goin’ on?”
Squall is
Squall is dancing with Rinoa. He’s
Squall is dancing with Rinoa. He’s struggling with the steps, but she won’t let him
struggling with the steps, but
“Squall?” Zell asks, his voice spiking with terror.
The music catches and repeats, like a skipping record.
Squall is dancing with a girl. He doesn’t know her face, but she caught his eye across the room and
A girl catches his eye across the room. He doesn’t know her face. She raises a
There’s a girl pulling him onto the dance floor. She doesn’t have a face. She
The music catches and repeats and repeats and repeats.
“Squall, what the hell, are you seein’ this? Are you there?”
The voice is the only thing that’s not skipping. It feels like something solid in the midst of everything falling apart.
Squall reaches out for the voice.
Rinoa takes his hand and puts it on her waist, smiles at him. She’s dissolving into the music.
But someone else takes his hand as well, someone seizes it and grips it, pressing the leather into his skin. And that reminds Squall that he’s wearing gloves, not barehanded at a ball. The dance isn’t real. Or-
(Rinoa smiles at him and disappears, over and over again.)
The dance is real, it really happened, it’s important to him. But it isn’t what’s happening now.
He half-crawls blindly across the dusty earth, as the ballroom loops in front of his eyes. Someone catches his shoulder without letting go of his hand, pulls him clumsily into their lap.
It’s Zell. He’s with Zell, that’s his actual situation, and he needs to get back there. It’s not exactly a good situation, but being trapped in these warped echoes of his memories is worse. He feels like he’s drowning.
He curls up and closes his eyes. Everything is still repeating, but being able to feel that Zell’s there is a kind of anchor, something stable to remind him of what’s real.
-
Eventually, Squall becomes aware that things have stopped moving. He’s not sure how long ago they stabilised, exactly. It’s like the early-morning realisation he sometimes has that he’s awake, and that he’s been awake for a while.
He opens his eyes.
“Squall?” Zell asks, instantly. “Oh, man, that was - that was messed up. Was that time compression? Is it over?”
It takes a moment for Squall to process his situation: his hands tucked tightly against his own neck, his head on Zell’s thigh, their legs half-tangled together. He uncurls himself and sits up, shifting away.
Maybe not shifting away as far as he intended. His shin’s still pressed against Zell’s ankle, a physical reminder of where he is, just in case he’s yanked into the past again.
Zell is pale, his hair coming loose from its styling, the lines of his tattoo standing out starkly against his skin. Squall probably doesn’t look much better. At least the hunger’s gone for now; he can’t think of eating anything without feeling nauseous.
“Are you okay?” Zell asks.
Squall doesn’t answer.
Zell sighs. “Yeah, me neither.” He clasps his hands behind his neck. “I just... kept seein’ all the times I knew I was about to die, over and over again. Like the missile base, and D-District, and Ultimecia.”
And here, Squall thinks.
“I guess it was the same kind of thing for you?” Zell asks.
There were a lot of moments. But it seemed like he spent most of it trapped in that dance.
Maybe that’s better: being tangled in the echoes of a good memory, instead of a bad one. But it was twisted, it was wrong. He can’t think about that dance now.
“You helped,” Squall says. “Thanks.”
Zell’s eyes widen. He coughs awkwardly into his hand. “I mean, I was losin’ it too. Uh, but that’s good to hear.”
-
It’s hard to picture either of them getting much sleep. But they might as well make the effort.
It’s getting darker, getting colder. There’s no sun visible through the cloud, if that’s what’s covering the sky at all. Maybe there’s a sun out there, it’s setting, it’ll rise and they’ll have light again. Maybe there’s no sun in this place; maybe there’s just the light, dying away, and when it’s gone it’s gone.
Either way, they probably won’t have to worry about it for long.
“Ground’s pretty hard,” Zell says. “Uh, how about we use my jacket as a pillow and yours as a blanket?”
It makes sense. They’ll both be a little more comfortable, at least, and staying close will help to conserve body heat.
-
As predicted, Squall doesn’t sleep. Tense about the situation, tense about the possibility of being thrown back into time compression. Tense in ways he can’t place.
He lies there, his stomach gnawing at him, Zell breathing against his chest. Watching the sky for any sign that there might be a dawn again. He can’t judge how many hours it’s been.
Eventually, Zell stirs against him. “Squall,” he mumbles, and then, half-coherent, “Where are we?”
Squall isn’t prepared to answer that question.
Zell shifts back a little and reaches up to touch Squall’s face; he’s not wearing his gauntlets. Squall goes still at the touch; he wasn’t expecting it. There’s no moonlight here, and it’s hard to see anything in this darkness. Zell’s thumb is resting over his lips.
Zell kisses him. His mouth is warm and slow, the only living thing in this empty darkness.
Squall tries to keep breathing, tries to make sense of what’s happening. Maybe Zell’s still dreaming. Maybe Squall is dreaming.
But, whatever the situation, he hasn’t tried to move away.
He closes his eyes, although it makes no real difference.
They’re probably not going to live long enough to worry about this, either.