Fanfiction: Truth (Final Fantasy VIII)
It's always interesting to see what I write in November. As it's a month in which I write a little every day, I often end up writing fics I might not have tackled otherwise.
Apparently, this November is heavy on weird, sad Final Fantasy VIII fanfiction. This one is very, very loosely inspired by Umineko, although it ended up being a lot less Umineko than the initial vague concept, in part because Rinoa is just too nice to play the role of Beatrice.
I had to put a 'JUST SO YOU KNOW, I'M VERY FOND OF RINOA, THIS ISN'T A BASHING FIC' disclaimer on this on AO3. I think the fandom's probably changed over the years, but there was a lot of Rinoa-bashing fanfiction in the early 2000s and people might have reason to be suspicious!
I can spot four or five of my recurring fanfiction themes in here. One day I'll actually count up how many fics I've written for each of my recurring themes and immediately disintegrate from embarrassment. Just write something new, Riona! (I'll never write something new and you can't make me.)
Title: Truth
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 1,700
Summary: Squall knows what he saw. Rinoa killed the others. But maybe it’s more complicated than that.
Squall chokes back to consciousness, his eyes flying open, a thousand things rushing into his mind at once. He’s on his back - he’s out in the open, exposed - he’s in the field of flowers outside the orphanage-
The others are dead, and their murderer is crouched over him, waiting for him to wake up.
“Squall?” Rinoa asks. She’s pale; she looks frightened, exhausted. “Are you okay?”
He grabs Revolver from his hip, and Rinoa throws herself backwards just in time. The point comes to a halt where her throat was an instant before, and they stare at each other down the blade, Squall lying in the grass and Rinoa standing over him.
Why wouldn’t she have killed him while he was unconscious?
Something’s wrong with his head.
“What do you remember?” Rinoa asks, very softly.
Maybe he’s not remembering it right. It’s like he’s seeing it through thick fog. Why would Rinoa want to hurt the others?
But she didn’t ask him why he just tried to kill her. She asked him what he remembered.
A part of his mind is trapped in another world, the world where Rinoa didn’t move quickly enough, the world where he’s watching her die at his hand. He can’t imagine what he’d be feeling. But he can’t imagine feeling worse than this, either.
“Are the others dead?” he asks. “I mean - Zell, Quistis, Selphie, Irvine. Are they...?”
Rinoa swallows. She’s not crying, but she’s shaking; he can see it, he can hear it in her voice when she speaks. “Yes.”
He knew it already. He saw it happen. Somehow, even after that, it only feels real now that he’s hearing it from her.
So his memories are real. But he lowers his gunblade. He can’t bring himself to use it right now, when he doesn’t have any answers.
He’s still lying there in the field. It’s hard to picture getting to his feet.
“Why did you kill them?” he asks.
He wants her to react with shock; he wants to know that that part isn’t true, at least. But the breath she lets out sounds almost relieved. He can’t make sense of anything.
“They didn’t suffer,” Rinoa says. “You remember that, right? And they didn’t know it was me?”
It was over in an instant, before Squall could process what he was seeing. Some kind of magic. The others weren’t looking at Rinoa when it happened; they didn’t seem to feel anything. It just makes it harder to understand.
“Are you trying to make me feel better about the fact that you killed my friends?” he asks.
“I was possessed.” She crouches again, strokes his face. The touch is strangely comforting. Squall thinks he might throw up. “You remember that, right?”
He seems to remember as she says it. Yes: she was swaying, the way she did when Ultimecia possessed her. But-
But that doesn’t make any sense. He’s seen Ultimecia’s cruelty. She wouldn’t have killed the others so quickly, so kindly, if death can be kind. That feels like Rinoa, even if he doesn’t understand it.
And-
“Why didn’t I try to stop you?” The words are wrenched out of him. It feels like saying too much, to a friend or an enemy. But he can’t stop himself. “I saw you swaying, I must have known you were possessed-”
“No,” Rinoa is saying over him, quickly, “no, no.” Stroking his face again, touching his neck, taking his glove off to touch his hand. “No, you tried to stop me. Don’t you remember? I - I held you in place with magic, you couldn’t have done anything - you tried to save the others, you did everything right, it’s just that no one could have stopped it.”
His head feels like it’s buzzing, every detail that comes back to him putting more pressure on the inside of his skull. She’s right; he tried to stop her. Why was he so certain a moment ago that he didn’t?
Nothing is making sense; he feels like someone’s cast Confuse on him. He summons an Esuna to his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” Rinoa asks. She catches his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
He pulls his hand out of her grip. Something’s wrong with his head, and being around her is making it worse. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him.
He doesn’t know why he’s lying here, letting Rinoa touch him, letting her speak so gently to him, after what he’s seen her do.
Rinoa raises a hand, and he feels something strange under his ribs, the sensation of someone else rifling through the spells he’s stored. The para-magic is in his head, he knows, with Shiva and Diablos and Leviathan, but he’s always felt like he calls it up from someone in his chest.
She’s trying to find his Esuna stores, he realises, to draw them before he can use them, and he casts it on himself without giving himself any more time to think about it.
Everything in his mind shifts and clears, falls into a new pattern, and his breath catches in his chest.
They went to the future; they confronted Ultimecia. Why didn’t he remember that?
Their powers had been sealed, somehow, in Ultimecia’s castle. Their GFs hadn’t answered their calls; magic had resisted their efforts to draw on it; even their medicine had tasted like ash, like nothing. They’d managed to regain some of their strength by defeating the beasts they found there.
But not all of it. Not enough.
Quistis had recommended caution, had suggested they should look for more of Ultimecia’s servants before confronting Ultimecia herself. Squall had been the one to decide they couldn’t wait. And...
Every breath is burning, his throat and his lungs too tight for the air he’s trying to draw in.
“You remember what happened?” Rinoa asks.
She’s looking at him, head tilted to one side, and the sympathy on her face hurts more than watching her kill the others in front of him.
“I brought everyone to fight Ultimecia,” Squall says. His throat dry, his voice barely there. “I knew we weren’t strong enough. I killed us all.”
“No.” Rinoa kisses him on the cheek. “I killed us all.”
Squall shakes his head. It’s a lie. A kind lie, and that doesn’t seem possible, that the terrible illusion he’s seen could have had kindness behind it. But a lie. He knows that now.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” Rinoa says. “It’s too much.”
“It’s my fault,” Squall says.
Rinoa smiles. There are tears in her eyes. “Just let it be mine. I can handle it.”
She reaches out to touch his face again. He scrambles backwards through the grass, crushing the flowers, more instinct than conscious decision. His heart is pounding so hard he feels like it’s going to break itself apart against his chest.
He remembers a time a T-Rexaur caught him by surprise in the training centre. He turned and met its eyes, and the moment seemed to lengthen, to hang suspended and silent in the air. Everything waiting, as it hit Squall in a slow instant that he could be about to die here in his home.
The moment stretches out now, as he looks into Rinoa’s dark eyes. She’s still watching him with that sympathetic concern.
“You can’t just rewrite my memories,” he says.
“They’re bad memories,” Rinoa says. “I wanted to help.”
He feels so cornered, lying on his back, even knowing that Rinoa wasn’t the one behind their deaths. He drags himself up to stand on unsteady feet, never taking his eyes off her. The movement feels like the pitching of a ship, like something he has no control over; it just serves to make him more nauseous.
But he’s upright, now. He knows the truth, now. It feels like it should be a kind of progress. It has to be better than not knowing.
Everyone’s dead, and he killed them.
“I don’t want to remember you killing them either,” he says.
There’s a long silence. There’s a breeze brushing through the field; it’s light, barely there, but it stands out vividly after the unnatural stillness of the air in Ultimecia’s time.
“What do you want to remember?” Rinoa asks at last.
The truth, he thinks.
They’re just words in his mind; they’re not what he feels. He doesn’t want the truth. He doesn’t want any of this.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We don’t get to choose.”
Rinoa raises her hand, and the breeze becomes stronger, stirring up their hair, rushing the sparse clouds across the sky. She catches a petal as it blows past her. When she opens her hand again, there’s a feather sitting on her palm.
“What if we do?” she asks.
The transformation is stranger, maybe, but the clouds are what Squall finds himself staring at. He’s not imagining things; they’re moving faster now. How far does Rinoa’s magic reach? How powerful is she?
Not powerful enough to change the past. The others are still dead, and he knows she’d bring them back if she could.
But she’s powerful enough to change how he remembers it. It’s not the same thing, but maybe it’s not that far off. They’re the only people who know what happened when they confronted Ultimecia; the story that leaves this field with them is the story the world is going to hear.
“I don’t think you made the wrong decision,” Rinoa says. “We still defeated her. We had to fight her then; we might not have been able to stop time compression if we’d waited. I hate that they’re gone, but they saved the world.”
Her words line up with his memories. But her words always line up with his memories.
We still defeated her. Is that true, or did they run when the others fell? Were they all lost in a wasted effort? Is time compression about to destroy everything?
“Is that true?” he asks.
She smiles, a little shakily. “I don’t know. It’s too big if it isn’t. It’s what I remember, but I don’t know if I’ve changed my own memory as well.”
He could cast another Esuna, if he wanted to be sure.
“We should go back to Garden,” he says.
Rinoa shakes her head. “Let’s stay here for a while.”
She sits down among the flowers. Squall has to admit it’s a beautiful place to rest and recover, or wait for the world to end.
He sits next to her.
Whatever the truth is, it’ll make itself known soon enough. It’s no use to them right now.
Apparently, this November is heavy on weird, sad Final Fantasy VIII fanfiction. This one is very, very loosely inspired by Umineko, although it ended up being a lot less Umineko than the initial vague concept, in part because Rinoa is just too nice to play the role of Beatrice.
I had to put a 'JUST SO YOU KNOW, I'M VERY FOND OF RINOA, THIS ISN'T A BASHING FIC' disclaimer on this on AO3. I think the fandom's probably changed over the years, but there was a lot of Rinoa-bashing fanfiction in the early 2000s and people might have reason to be suspicious!
I can spot four or five of my recurring fanfiction themes in here. One day I'll actually count up how many fics I've written for each of my recurring themes and immediately disintegrate from embarrassment. Just write something new, Riona! (I'll never write something new and you can't make me.)
Title: Truth
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 1,700
Summary: Squall knows what he saw. Rinoa killed the others. But maybe it’s more complicated than that.
Squall chokes back to consciousness, his eyes flying open, a thousand things rushing into his mind at once. He’s on his back - he’s out in the open, exposed - he’s in the field of flowers outside the orphanage-
The others are dead, and their murderer is crouched over him, waiting for him to wake up.
“Squall?” Rinoa asks. She’s pale; she looks frightened, exhausted. “Are you okay?”
He grabs Revolver from his hip, and Rinoa throws herself backwards just in time. The point comes to a halt where her throat was an instant before, and they stare at each other down the blade, Squall lying in the grass and Rinoa standing over him.
Why wouldn’t she have killed him while he was unconscious?
Something’s wrong with his head.
“What do you remember?” Rinoa asks, very softly.
Maybe he’s not remembering it right. It’s like he’s seeing it through thick fog. Why would Rinoa want to hurt the others?
But she didn’t ask him why he just tried to kill her. She asked him what he remembered.
A part of his mind is trapped in another world, the world where Rinoa didn’t move quickly enough, the world where he’s watching her die at his hand. He can’t imagine what he’d be feeling. But he can’t imagine feeling worse than this, either.
“Are the others dead?” he asks. “I mean - Zell, Quistis, Selphie, Irvine. Are they...?”
Rinoa swallows. She’s not crying, but she’s shaking; he can see it, he can hear it in her voice when she speaks. “Yes.”
He knew it already. He saw it happen. Somehow, even after that, it only feels real now that he’s hearing it from her.
So his memories are real. But he lowers his gunblade. He can’t bring himself to use it right now, when he doesn’t have any answers.
He’s still lying there in the field. It’s hard to picture getting to his feet.
“Why did you kill them?” he asks.
He wants her to react with shock; he wants to know that that part isn’t true, at least. But the breath she lets out sounds almost relieved. He can’t make sense of anything.
“They didn’t suffer,” Rinoa says. “You remember that, right? And they didn’t know it was me?”
It was over in an instant, before Squall could process what he was seeing. Some kind of magic. The others weren’t looking at Rinoa when it happened; they didn’t seem to feel anything. It just makes it harder to understand.
“Are you trying to make me feel better about the fact that you killed my friends?” he asks.
“I was possessed.” She crouches again, strokes his face. The touch is strangely comforting. Squall thinks he might throw up. “You remember that, right?”
He seems to remember as she says it. Yes: she was swaying, the way she did when Ultimecia possessed her. But-
But that doesn’t make any sense. He’s seen Ultimecia’s cruelty. She wouldn’t have killed the others so quickly, so kindly, if death can be kind. That feels like Rinoa, even if he doesn’t understand it.
And-
“Why didn’t I try to stop you?” The words are wrenched out of him. It feels like saying too much, to a friend or an enemy. But he can’t stop himself. “I saw you swaying, I must have known you were possessed-”
“No,” Rinoa is saying over him, quickly, “no, no.” Stroking his face again, touching his neck, taking his glove off to touch his hand. “No, you tried to stop me. Don’t you remember? I - I held you in place with magic, you couldn’t have done anything - you tried to save the others, you did everything right, it’s just that no one could have stopped it.”
His head feels like it’s buzzing, every detail that comes back to him putting more pressure on the inside of his skull. She’s right; he tried to stop her. Why was he so certain a moment ago that he didn’t?
Nothing is making sense; he feels like someone’s cast Confuse on him. He summons an Esuna to his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” Rinoa asks. She catches his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
He pulls his hand out of her grip. Something’s wrong with his head, and being around her is making it worse. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him.
He doesn’t know why he’s lying here, letting Rinoa touch him, letting her speak so gently to him, after what he’s seen her do.
Rinoa raises a hand, and he feels something strange under his ribs, the sensation of someone else rifling through the spells he’s stored. The para-magic is in his head, he knows, with Shiva and Diablos and Leviathan, but he’s always felt like he calls it up from someone in his chest.
She’s trying to find his Esuna stores, he realises, to draw them before he can use them, and he casts it on himself without giving himself any more time to think about it.
Everything in his mind shifts and clears, falls into a new pattern, and his breath catches in his chest.
They went to the future; they confronted Ultimecia. Why didn’t he remember that?
Their powers had been sealed, somehow, in Ultimecia’s castle. Their GFs hadn’t answered their calls; magic had resisted their efforts to draw on it; even their medicine had tasted like ash, like nothing. They’d managed to regain some of their strength by defeating the beasts they found there.
But not all of it. Not enough.
Quistis had recommended caution, had suggested they should look for more of Ultimecia’s servants before confronting Ultimecia herself. Squall had been the one to decide they couldn’t wait. And...
Every breath is burning, his throat and his lungs too tight for the air he’s trying to draw in.
“You remember what happened?” Rinoa asks.
She’s looking at him, head tilted to one side, and the sympathy on her face hurts more than watching her kill the others in front of him.
“I brought everyone to fight Ultimecia,” Squall says. His throat dry, his voice barely there. “I knew we weren’t strong enough. I killed us all.”
“No.” Rinoa kisses him on the cheek. “I killed us all.”
Squall shakes his head. It’s a lie. A kind lie, and that doesn’t seem possible, that the terrible illusion he’s seen could have had kindness behind it. But a lie. He knows that now.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” Rinoa says. “It’s too much.”
“It’s my fault,” Squall says.
Rinoa smiles. There are tears in her eyes. “Just let it be mine. I can handle it.”
She reaches out to touch his face again. He scrambles backwards through the grass, crushing the flowers, more instinct than conscious decision. His heart is pounding so hard he feels like it’s going to break itself apart against his chest.
He remembers a time a T-Rexaur caught him by surprise in the training centre. He turned and met its eyes, and the moment seemed to lengthen, to hang suspended and silent in the air. Everything waiting, as it hit Squall in a slow instant that he could be about to die here in his home.
The moment stretches out now, as he looks into Rinoa’s dark eyes. She’s still watching him with that sympathetic concern.
“You can’t just rewrite my memories,” he says.
“They’re bad memories,” Rinoa says. “I wanted to help.”
He feels so cornered, lying on his back, even knowing that Rinoa wasn’t the one behind their deaths. He drags himself up to stand on unsteady feet, never taking his eyes off her. The movement feels like the pitching of a ship, like something he has no control over; it just serves to make him more nauseous.
But he’s upright, now. He knows the truth, now. It feels like it should be a kind of progress. It has to be better than not knowing.
Everyone’s dead, and he killed them.
“I don’t want to remember you killing them either,” he says.
There’s a long silence. There’s a breeze brushing through the field; it’s light, barely there, but it stands out vividly after the unnatural stillness of the air in Ultimecia’s time.
“What do you want to remember?” Rinoa asks at last.
The truth, he thinks.
They’re just words in his mind; they’re not what he feels. He doesn’t want the truth. He doesn’t want any of this.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We don’t get to choose.”
Rinoa raises her hand, and the breeze becomes stronger, stirring up their hair, rushing the sparse clouds across the sky. She catches a petal as it blows past her. When she opens her hand again, there’s a feather sitting on her palm.
“What if we do?” she asks.
The transformation is stranger, maybe, but the clouds are what Squall finds himself staring at. He’s not imagining things; they’re moving faster now. How far does Rinoa’s magic reach? How powerful is she?
Not powerful enough to change the past. The others are still dead, and he knows she’d bring them back if she could.
But she’s powerful enough to change how he remembers it. It’s not the same thing, but maybe it’s not that far off. They’re the only people who know what happened when they confronted Ultimecia; the story that leaves this field with them is the story the world is going to hear.
“I don’t think you made the wrong decision,” Rinoa says. “We still defeated her. We had to fight her then; we might not have been able to stop time compression if we’d waited. I hate that they’re gone, but they saved the world.”
Her words line up with his memories. But her words always line up with his memories.
We still defeated her. Is that true, or did they run when the others fell? Were they all lost in a wasted effort? Is time compression about to destroy everything?
“Is that true?” he asks.
She smiles, a little shakily. “I don’t know. It’s too big if it isn’t. It’s what I remember, but I don’t know if I’ve changed my own memory as well.”
He could cast another Esuna, if he wanted to be sure.
“We should go back to Garden,” he says.
Rinoa shakes her head. “Let’s stay here for a while.”
She sits down among the flowers. Squall has to admit it’s a beautiful place to rest and recover, or wait for the world to end.
He sits next to her.
Whatever the truth is, it’ll make itself known soon enough. It’s no use to them right now.