Chapter Text
I. The smack in the face
"Leonhart, take your place."
Squall Leonhart, 17 and captain of the Combat Arts Club, stepped onto the training mats, the worn rubber a familiar sensation underneath his thin-soled sparring shoes. The air was electric with anticipation. Squall’s heart hammered uncharacteristically in his throat, as if fighting a peer with a wooden sword wasn't something he did, at least twice a week, at 3.30 pm (give or take fifteen minutes, depending on how full the post-class locker rooms were) in the dusty sports hall of Balamb Garden, a Prestigious Military Academy for Exemplary Youth (or more accurately, youth who really needed military scholarships in this economy, a job in the military and/or political connections). It was nearly as if Squall’s subconscious mind knew something was about to happen. Something bad, something painful, something blonde and even worse-tempered.
Seifer Almasy, barely eighteen and already six-feet-something stood before him on the mats, a wooden sparring gunblade, its sharp edges taped down with rubber tape, held in one hand like a rapier.
"Almasy - both hands on the hilt …" Squall heard Instructor Grey’s tired voice in the background, seemingly far away, mouthing off about how the gunblade was a two-handed weapon, no matter how much you curled in the gym, no matter what the movies showed or how cool and awesome a one-handed stance looked.
Really, Instructor Grey shouldn't have bothered - Almasy's green eyes were trained on Squall intently, like a predator setting his sights on some hapless critter, something like a confident smirk curling his lip. The boy was miles away and by the looks of it, eviscerating Squall in his head. Grey could probably have told him to take off his sweats and run laps around sports hall with them tied to his head for a thousand gil - Squall couldn't see Almasy stopping or changing course from whatever he had already started in his mind.
Guy’s a weirdo. We know already that. Whatever.
The tall blonde boy didn't have a reputation for being compliant anyway, were he listening. He had a reputation for being, well, intense, or a bit of a psycho – depending on how politely phrased the answer had to be.
What-ever.
Squall gripped his sparring gunblade - the Lionheart, he whispered to himself sometimes, a name he had given the wooden training weapon one night as he had worked oil into the wood with a worn flannel cloth and had then sworn never to tell anyone in case they laughed - with both hands and planted his feet (right foot forward, left foot slightly behind – heel raised) as he had been taught. He inhaled, sure to keep his face as expressionless as he could, eager not to betray the adrenaline that coursed through his veins.
"Almasy? Hello Almasy? Okay fine whatever - it's your face, Almasy. We’ve told you before. Boys, a good, clean fight now - three, two, -" Instructor Grey hadn't even finished the count when Almasy lunged forward, his wooden gunblade (“the HYPERION," he had all but announced in the locker room on the day of combat art club try-outs) a brown blur.
Squall lifted the Lionheart to parry - the force from Seifer's blade nearly knocking him off balance and barrelled forward as he forced Almasy back. Almasy spun and swept (still with one arm – the bloody showboat), and Squall sensing this opening, lunged forward - but missed. Almasy had leapt backwards and now smirked. Squall once again run-charged with his wooden blade, and Almasy spun again.
Training for the ballet, Almasy? Squall would have bet a hundred gil that Almasy was imagining wearing a trench, because Almasy clearly thought Almasy was cool and everybloodyone knew, including Squall, and trenchcoats were cool (unless it made you look like a Deling city school shooter, but nevermind, to each his own, thought Squall).
Flashy, flashy, but with your opponent showboating a good few feet away from you when it mattered it was getting pretty hard to land a blow. Another charge from Squall - he had joined combat arts for combat damn it, not dance - and Seifer parried (still one arm - How much did this idiot lift) and spun again - lifting one palm to the sky and curling his fingers upwards - the universal handsign for "come let's fucking fight".
Squall felt his blood boil. He was a pretty charge-forward-hit-and-run sorta guy – come to think of it, and Almasy was well, strong, fast and but god what a theatrical dolt. Squall charged again, getting dangerously close and Seifer (this was definitely a foul in competition rules, Squall thought idly) shoved him, with his free arm (oh) like an angry cheerleader in a coming of age tale about female bullying.
What the fuck, thought Squall, who was pretty close to falling on his ass - not a great look for team captain really, but Seifer - didn't stop. Squall should have known from the look on the idiot's face. The smirk was gone and replaced with something wild and feral, his green eyes wild and wide. Almasy brought his wooden blade down, reckless, breathless，and oh-so-feckless and a poorly-taped edge caught Squall somewhere above his brows and continued its downward trajectory towards his nose.
Seifer's eyes widened even more- the feral expression on his face momentarily replaced with… panic. Squall felt an odd heat and then pain - pain like nothing he had ever felt on the mat exploding in his face- liquid and hot and dripping down, down onto his lips and he tasted the copper – Blood.
The blonde idiot had cut his face open with a taped wooden sword.
Not entirely purely on instinct, Squall brought his blade upwards in an arc, more forceful than he had ever meant on the mats and then bullseye, contact - somewhere between Seifer's mouth and his eye. A strident panicked whistle, and Grey screaming to stop. And then it all…stopped.
II. Well, fuck
The thing about the world stopping is that when it starts again, it starts with a vengeance.
Like a thunderclap in a gathering storm, the silence broke, and with it brought chaos.
Instructor Grey, screaming his head off to get a stretcher, get the nurse, the boy is bleeding – and someone's rubber soled shoes squeaking as it bounded on the dusty parquet floor, no doubt to do just that - frantic words and voices around him,
"Squall! Are you hurt? Squall!" A girl's voice, panicky and frantic, and elsewhere a deeper baritone echoing across the room, "SEIFER! SEIFER ARE YOU OK BRO?"
Squall forced his eyes open. It hurt. They hurt. His face hurt - it felt like the parts between his eyes and his nose were burning. His world was red-tinged - hot, sticky blood was seeping into this eyes, down his nose and into his mouth. He was on the ground, on his knees - they had folded after he swung his wooden sword upwards and where it had made contact -he had struck Almasy too, hadn't he?
He looked around, shaking, willing his vision to focus and bunching his fists in the effort - his classmates were crowding him. He hated it. He needed space. Someone was messing with a first aid box and trying to force him back down on his back. He pushed the meddling, clumsy hands of someone off and him tried to stand, both hands by his sides on the ground and still shaking - where the hell was Almasy?
He didn't for a second think that the blonde was going to be doing much better - and he hated that the thought even crossed his mind.
He spotted Raijin first. Tanned, even taller and wider than Almasy, and twice as loud. He was crouched down, waving for someone to help a figure on the ground. A flash of silver hair next to him - Fujin, silent as ever, a certain frantic urgency in her movements as she and Raijjin worked to pull the figure in gym sweats on the ground into a sitting position. Her one uncovered eye met his – her expression unreadable.
A wave of vertigo hit him, and hit him hard. The sports hall tilted sharply sideways, as if someone had simply shifted the frame of a camera. The edges of his vision dimmed and then, it struck him - how much of the red was running down his face, not just into his mouth, but into the collar of his white gym shirt. The dark grey of the school enblem embroidered below the collar was starting to look maroon. And another wave - and this time, it was as if someone had switched off the hanging lights on the ceiling above.
Squall Leonhart crumpled and fell back onto the floor of the sports hall with a sickening thud - only punctuated by a single uttered fuck by Instructor Grey himself.