Breathe

Sequel to "Thunder".

Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VIII belongs to Squaresoft and its original creators. The song, "Dolphin's Cry" belongs to the band Live. I make no profit from the writing of this work of fanfiction.

~Lyrics~

~The way you're bathed in light

Reminds me of that night

God laid me down into your rose garden of trust

And I was swept away

With nothin' left to say

Some helpless fool, yeah

I was lost in a swoon of peace

You're all I need to find

So when the time is right

Come to me sweetly, come to me

Come to me~

(Seifer)

The gentle, almost meek knock on my door was unanticipated, especially at the late hour. I wasn't expecting company, never was in fact. No one was supposed to be aware of my location, so when the soft wrap came upon my apartment door just passed one in the morning, I opened the door without a second thought, assuming the guest had merely gotten the wrong apartment number. It had happened before. I'd assumed incorrectly; it was no stranger stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning.

He looked beautiful, standing there in the pale moonlight, his skin looking ghostly, frame thinner than I remembered. His eyes were just as stormy as they'd always been and the slap across my left cheek stung as it should with a resounding crack of leather on skin...

Seeing him there reminded me of another moonlit night from the distant past. The first night I'd knocked on his dorm door, standing in the silent hall, empty of students after curfew. Stormy eyes had been bright when the door opened to me and he moved aside to let me inside. I'd known at the time that I was being given something extraordinary, a gift he'd never given to anyone before. It was a known fact that no one had ever seen inside Squall's inner sanctum, the refuge that was his dorm and yet he let me in as if it was the most natural thing for him to do.

No lights had been on, the only source coming from the moonlight, pouring in through slated blinds and illuminating the smooth whiteness of porcelain flesh. I was completely taken under the spell of the ethereal beauty that was him. He didn't know, had never realized just how utterly breathtaking he was; how completely I'd fallen under his spell.

I touched him for the first time there, in the small space that was his alone, the two of us beneath the dappled beams of moonlight. He let me with no words, no protests, no expectations, and the vulnerability that shone in wintery depths stole whatever whispers I might have meant to speak in return.

It was quiet, only mingled breaths and the whispered rustling of shed clothing broke the silent tranquillity that had blanketed us. And I had been swept away, swallowed by the storm in those exquisitely murky eyes. I loved him then...

The sweet memory had been shattered by the harsh sting of a palm impacting with my cheek, plummeting me back to the present reality, where Squall, my Squall stood before me, angry, confused, and hurt, but just as breathtaking as he had been back then. I swallowed hard, unable to speak, knowing what he'd endured at my hands in a more recent past.

~Love will lead us; alright

Love will lead us; she will lead us

Can you hear the dolphin's cry?

See the road rise up to meet us

It's in the air we breathe tonight

Love will lead us; she will lead us~

Cloudy irises disappeared beneath a shield of dark lashes as he closed his eyes, petal-pink lips trembling ever so slightly as he freed a breath of relief from within his chest. Crystalline tears crept out from beneath exhaustion bruised lids. What was left to do for this terribly anguished, terribly beautiful creature, but to reach for him? I enfolded him within my arms, holding him to my chest, letting the diamond tears soak into my shirt, the salt stinging the wounds in my heart.

"Seifer..." it was no more than a sweet exhale of breath as he came to me, slim arms immediately pulling me in so tightly as if trying to merge our bodies into one. It was so like him, so desperate in his need to feel me, nails digging through the fabric of my cotton shirt into the flesh of my shoulders as he pulled me in as surely as the storm in his eyes would drown me.

There were no questions, no accusations, or apologies as we embraced, the door still wide open, starlight pouring in, bathing us in its peaceful rays. There would be time for words later. I held him tighter, closer still, reaching one arm to close the wayward door on the world outside, allowing him into my space as he had allowed me so long ago. Here, we were free, the calm and ease settling over us as everything else faded away to static.

~Oh yeah, we meet again

It's like we never left

Time in between was just a dream

Did we leave this place?

This crazy fog surrounds me

You wrap your legs around me

All I can do to try and breathe

Let me breathe, so that I

So we can go together!~

Had it really been so long? It was as though we'd never parted, as if time had stopped the moment we'd been separated and began once more when I'd opened my door to him. Time in our absence from one another had been a dream, a melancholy and regrettable dream.

My fingers found their way into familiar chocolate locks, wound tightly and basking in the cinnamon silk webbed strands. A well-remembered scent crawled over me, seeping into my senses, my very core as I tangled myself in the welcome trap that was him. How easy it could be to lock ourselves away together like this and disappear from the world outside these walls, from responsibility and obligation, law and order, good and evil...Where we could be Squall and Seifer, not heroes or villains, not martyrs or knights, just two boys in love.

But I am not so jaded to think that we could shed our worldly trappings for more than a night, maybe the morning if luck played on our side. We had made our choices, or I had made our choices for the both of us, a guilt I would never be free of. And Squall knew it too. I could feel it in his fingertips marking the flesh beneath the cotton of my shirt and the heated urgency of his breath as he stripped that shirt off of me, his own following as though melting from his milky skin.

And there was fear there, in the tears on his cheeks and quivering of his lips, the bite of his nails and the press of his thighs to my sides as I sank into him. It was in the quiet sounds that echoed and in my own frantic need to merge with him, to become one; to be complete as we had always been only halves on our own, living only half-alive until we could cling to each other in the moonlight, desperately grasping at the other half of our souls inside one another. We had waited what seemed like an eternity for that moment when we would be free to breathe life into the other, to mend wings that had been tethered for far too long and fly so far away from everything the held us captive.

It sounded like a prayer for suicide, truly, it could have been. I had been so ready to die by his hands no more than a year before and yet I had lived and so had he, if only barely, we had. And then he'd found me, stormed my hidden fortress and broke my world apart, bringing his moonlight into my blackened night. And how could I ever let him go again?

~ love will lead us, alright
love will lead us, she will lead us
can you hear the dolphin's cry?
see the road rise up to meet us
it's in the air we breathe tonight
love will lead us, she will lead us~

His heels dug into the small of my back as his lips crushed mine, our bodies moving as one being, fingers running rampant over supple skin and bone and digging into hair, pulling in a futile attempt to be closer when there was no room to even breathe between us. And as we arched in synchronized passion and his beautiful eyes opened, meeting mine, the milky-way gathered and spiralling inwards in the twilight of them, I could see all the feelings he held for me. I told him then, as many times as I should have, for all the days he hadn't heard it, that I loved him, would always love him, and had always loved him. Maybe even from a time before we were born, before our soul had been split into two and trapped within each of us, we had loved each other.

We had never been cowards and when we'd realized what we shared, we had been drawn together as surely as two opposing magnets and so many things had kept tearing us apart. When would it be time for us to be together? When would we get to have a little peace, to stop saving the world so others could love? When would we be free to love each other?

~ life is like a shooting star
it don't matter who you are
if you only run for cover, it's just a waste of time
we are lost 'til we are found
this phoenix rises up from the ground
and all these wars are over~

I hadn't realized how lost I'd been until he'd found me once again. And I was scared to let him leave me again, frightened by the thought of losing a piece of myself again, of living in the darkness for the rest of my life with only glimpses of the moon from my barred cell.

As we laid breathless and wound together in a knot so tight that anyone would be hard-pressed to find where either of us began or ended, Squall began to speak, a hot hand heavy over my heart, head on my shoulder.

"Seifer, why didn't you come for me? I waited... I waited so long, I thought I would starve to death without you. I forgave you. Why didn't you come?" His words were like knives, sharp and devastatingly wounding, cutting through my flesh as surely as Lionheart's blade would.

"Squall; my beautiful, broken Squall, I was lost and no apologies I could ever say would be enough to express how terribly sorry I am that I left you that way to find your way on your own. I can hardly fathom how I could leave you to navigate the darkness alone to find me. I can only promise that it will never happen again." My own voice sounded too quiet even to my own ears, words I might never have voiced had he not wounded me so accurately with his own, had his anguish not torn at me like it did. I could deny him nothing and an answer had been his request, a genuine answer that must be given.

"How?" And his eyes were filled with the same vulnerability from years before, from the first time and anything I told him now, he would follow me.

"Stay..."

And he did.

~Come to me~

END.

Hope everyone liked it, though it was written a bit different and maybe people will think that Seifer is OOC but really, I think Seifer is secretly very romantic and probably would be corny when in love. Can't anyone else see him writing poetry in the privacy of his dorm room late at night? Anyways, I can and so he thinks in poetry in this fic.

R&R. I appreciate the feedback.

Xander