Chapter Text
It wasn’t an especially poetic way to go, he thought. Ask him two years ago how he’d go out and he’d say with the biggest fuckin’ bang you ever knew, but he’d seen the biggest fucking bang their world had in store for them, he’d seen to it with his own two hands, and it was supposed to be beautiful. What it was was the culmination of all his dead dreams and his fears and disappointments, and when he’d bled out, he did so with no choice but to acknowledge that he was a pawn before he was a knight, and that was all any of them had ever been. Just another fucking cog in the system, chugging away.
Sitting by the sea, wind on his face, no cloud in the sky, he daydreamed of this once, before he could feel the chain around his neck. He’d been here before, too, just like this, blood sour on his tongue, dripping down his mouth and his chin, his back on any filthy wall he could find to prop him up, beer on his breath and worse waiting to find its way down his shirt. Somehow, he was here again.
Maybe it was no more and no less than he deserved, Seifer thought. And maybe he liked it that way. Karma was a real bitch sometimes. He’d always liked them a little crazy, though. It was much more fun.
But maybe he deserved a quieter death now; a whisper of a thing, a candle snuffed out in the night, never really there at all. Was that too much to wish for, after all he’d been through? Repenting didn’t get him far but he could pay penance somehow, right? Taken out of his flesh, taken from his heart, whatever Karma wanted, she could have it. If it was his life, well—he’d thought he was ready, but maybe not. How could one life compensate for everything that they’d lost because of him?
Down the alley, a single flood lamp illuminated the dumpster two doors on. It flickered pathetically, smeared with rain, struggling to breathe as he did, desperate to keep on keeping on.
The cold light it cast was too dim and too far for it to matter at all, and it served him no use, save, perhaps, for something to watch, dreamily, as his life-force drained out from his stomach. A nice bit of companionship in these boring last minutes. Dark hair, bright eyes, pale skin.
Once upon a time, he was supposed to bleed out in the gentle arms of a woman who needed him. She had dark hair and bright eyes, too.
One, two, dark, said the streetlight. One, two, dark.
Months back, he found out that blood and beer tasted better than brine on the air and another goddamned fish in the bucket, and despite the summer storms, the concrete wasn’t half as slimy, either, just wet and seeping through his trousers, but it was just rainwater, and maybe whatever sludge stained the Dollet back-alleys post-cleanup.
There was something about ripping the hook out of their shimmering flesh, their hollow black eyes unmoving, unseeing, that made his stomach churn, but he’d needed the money then, and Rai and Fuu did, too, so it was the least he could do to close his eyes and throw the next herring in the bucket, its slimy body slapping sickly against all the rest.
With the big ones, Rai said, you had to knock them on the head so they wouldn’t feel it. He wasn’t very good at that part, but that’s what Fuu was there for, he said.
They shouldn’t have fished him out of there. They should have left him to burn. That’s what he deserved, anonymity in blackened ash and melted bone, to be forgotten somewhere among the long, unforgiving annals of history. One more link in the chain. Or—or maybe it wasn’t, maybe that was too kind for a wretch like him. He’d cut down gods and he’d cut down more, if it meant that he’d get what he wanted.
Seifer hadn’t figured out how to pay them back for dragging his charred body out of the wreckage, but he was working on it.
While getting out of their hair should’ve been the best way to broker his debts, a constant voice in his head—sounding not unlike Fujin’s, actually—liked to point out that that was as good as unzipping his fly, stepping on their bodies and pissing on their efforts, so then he was back at square one and he was no more than a wretch looking down the barrel who couldn’t even pull the goddamned trigger.
Still, Seifer was a quick learner, and he’d learned even quicker that a nice buzz kept a smile on his face, and from there, it was more economical to get a shot between beers, and with a couple more he could forget her and all her golden promises. He could forget what he’d done for a few glorious hours. He could forget the dreams of an optimistic boy that should’ve known better, and he could laugh again, and not the sick, twisted thing that he learned to choke out of himself when Rai and Fuu (he should just start calling them RAIFUU, one word, they were one unit, really, and he couldn’t fit into the empty space they’d left for him anymore, misshapen as he was) looked a second too long, but something genuine, bubbling up out of him like it used to, and sometimes it got him into trouble, but he’d always liked trouble.
Unfortunately, Fate had never been especially kind to her children.
His friendly light was blocked; his pulse was too loud in his ears for him to hear the approach and the darkness too thick to discern any detail, but through the lovely-velvet-black Seifer could make out a figure, one haloed in silver filament.
“Here to take me away? Took you fuckin’ long enough.”
“I’m here to take you back.”