Daisies were no substitute for malboro tentacles, but Quistis found them strong enough to withstand her fidgeting.
She sat in the middle of the last frantic scramble of wildflowers, just where the meadow gave way to the shoreline, and watched the waves break against the beach. Late in the afternoon like this, there was a breeze coming off the water, sharp and quick, undeterred by this little spit of land. All she could hear was the sound of it rushing past her ears, and the screeching of the gulls as they skimmed over the breakwater. Somewhere, behind her, up on the hill, were the ruins the orphanage. Somewhere behind that was the Ragnarok.
Needing to get away, she'd come down here.
With the sound of the ocean in front of her, and the gentle rise of the hill at her back, it was easy enough to pretend there wasn't anything else but this. The Ragnarok itself wasn't the problem. It was just that she'd had enough of things that flew. Of flying in general. Of anything, at the moment, under any circumstances, that might take her off the ground.
She thought she deserved it, if only for a few hours. It wasn't as if she fell down from the moon every day.
There was a half-circle of ground in front of her, with a radius as long as her outstretched arm, where far fewer wildflowers grew than when she'd first sat down. Next to her thigh lay a pile of daisies. When picking them had grown dull, she'd taken up a handful, snapped off the heads into her lap, and seen what she could do with the stems.
As a whip, it was a disgrace. Flowers, however long and flexible, were a substandard medium. But it gave her something to do with her hands. It was, in a way, grounding.
She needed grounding, the way she'd been acting lately. She reached out to snap off another flower, and pulled up some of the root with it. What had she been thinking, to say those things to Squall? Really. To wonder out loud like that if there'd ever be anyone who'd jump into nothingness after her. Be a little more pitiful, Quistis. Be a little more needy.
Grow a backbone, maybe, and then you'll be some good against the Lunatic Pandora. Against this sorceress.
She could be getting ready to fight. But there really wasn't anything left to do. Save the Queen was in perfect condition. Couldn't be any other way, not with all the use she'd seen of late. This wasn't like waiting at Balamb for an assignment. She hadn't had a chance to get out of practice.
So Quistis sat, and plaited flowers, and told herself she was calm.
"Hey."
She flinched. The stem in her fingers snapped.
Irvine winced. "Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."
"It's all right," she said. Juice seeped from the broken stem and down the back of her hand. She wiped it off on her skirt. Working backwards, she undid the last two rows. "It's not as if I'll run out any time soon."
"I can see that." Irvine crouched down, the leather of his chaps creaking as it stretched over his knees. He was, on this overcast afternoon, not wearing his hat, and looked younger for the lack of it. He leaned forward and picked a flower, rolling the stem between his fingers, making the bloom spin dizzily. The petals were such a pale blush of lavender that they only just missed being white. "They grow like weeds," he said, adding it to her pile.
"They are weeds."
"Can't be. I remember Matron used to have them in the garden behind the kitchen."
Odd how the meaning of a word could change. 'Garden' sounded naked without a 'Balamb' in front of it. It had been so long since she'd heard it spoken in its first context that it took her mind a moment to find the right images. But once they came, they were vibrant: green, and color, and the warm damp smell of growing things. Daisies, too, but not these stubborn, wild ones. Tall, elegant blooms of oxeye daisy, planted in the back row against the stone of the foundation, with heavy heads that nodded in time with the wind. Very different, to someone who knew what to look for.
"This one," she said, selecting Irvine's offering from the top of the pile, "is Erigeron elatior. The ones Matron planted were Chrysanthemum leucanthemum. They're both called daisies, but this one--"
She broke off her own lecture, realizing that the garden she saw so clearly in her head, shivering with color and scent, wasn't a fiction at all. It scratched at her brain; it had no more patience for being locked away. Bees hummed as they sampled the taste of the dahlia blooms. The sulfur tang of chives rose from the stones where she'd trampled them underfoot, and she stretched out her too-short arms, trying to reach the rosemary...
She bit her lip, and stared down at her dirt-stained hands. Her fingers were still moving through the pattern of the braid. Over-under-over. Over-under-over.
Someone, at some time, must have taught her how to do this. Someone must have been the first to lay rawhide strips in her hands and show her how to stretch them taut and join them together to be the belly of a whip. But she couldn't remember who it had been.
Maybe she'd been born knowing.
Irvine cleared his throat. Brushing aside the tail of his duster, he sat down, facing the sea, letting the wind keep his hair out of his face. He reached across her leg, but didn't let even the sleeve of his coat brush against her, as if to touch her might jostle her apart. She wasn't at all certain it wouldn't. From the shadows of the daisies, he plucked a bloom of white clover, and held it up.
"What's this one called?"
Quistis felt suddenly giddy. "Clover?"
He made a face and threw it at her. It struck her cheek with all the force of breath. She dodged, well after the fact, and laughed. "You asked!"
He snorted. It might have been indignant, if he'd been better at hiding his smile. "Even I know 'clover.'"
"Trifolium repens," she said, still grinning. "'Tri' for 'three,' 'folium' for--"
"--leaf," he said, just as she did.
It had not been so long since she'd been in front of a class of cadets that she'd forgotten how to arch her brow and wait.
He flashed a grin. "Sorry."
Very primly, Quistis finished the lesson. "And 'repens' means 'creeping.' There. Aren't you glad you asked?"
"Absolutely. I might have stayed awake in class more often if I'd had a teacher like you."
"You'd probably have pretended to fall asleep, just to make me keep you after for detention."
"Better believe it. In fact, it's a damned shame we aren't in class right now. I don't guess you do any private tutoring?" He yawned, purely for effect, but somewhere in the middle it turned serious, and he shook his head a little to get out of it.
The seagulls were edging up from the beach, leaving zig-zag bird tracks in the sand. Either they were getting braver, or had remembered that humans were occasionally a source of handouts.
Quistis flicked the trailing end of the plait out of her way. "Don't you have any other girls to bother?"
"Nope." He didn't sound troubled by it. "Selphie's got a new love."
"Let me guess. Big, loud, and responds to her every whim?"
"I had every one of those covered, you know." He plucked a discarded daisy head from Quistis' lap, and pitched it sidearm towards the foremost gull. His aim was excellent. Squawking outrage, the bird retreated.
"But the Ragnarok can fly."
"Yeah, well." Another daisy head, another direct hit on a gray-flecked wing. "I'm still working on that."
"And it's got bigger guns."
He sighed. "Now, why'd you have to go and say a thing like that--"
"Well, it's true."
"--something so cold and heartless--" he went on, hands sketching dramatic gestures in the air.
Quistis shook her head. "I take it back. Exeter's better. Exeter's wonderful."
"--to a guy who came all the way down here just so he could see why a pretty lady like you was sitting all alone and playing in the dirt."
Oh. Her hair was trailing against her face. She tucked it behind her ear. So that was why he'd come. Someone had noticed that it wasn't typical behavior for a SeeD, much less this particular SeeD-turned-Instructor-turned-SeeD-again,to be sitting idle on the beach like a lost child. She let the flowers fall into her lap and dug her fingertips into the soil. It felt loose and cold.
"It's more sand than dirt," she said.
He brushed a clover blossom over the back of her knuckles. "Either way, you've got a lot of it under your fingernails."
She thought, quite deliberately, about what to say to that. She wondered why she felt the need to be so careful. Finally, she said, "Good."
Irvine was quiet for a long minute. It wasn't uncomfortable, to sit in silence, but it was something different for him to be here and not be egging her on. Or bantering with Selphie. Or putting far too much effort into finding new ways to irritate Zell. Or teasing Squall, to find out what he wouldn't say, as much as for what he would.
She had known he could be quiet. It was just that quiet usually meant he had the butt of his gun tucked against his shoulder, and was taking aim. Bracing for the kickback. She looked up. His face, clear of shadows in the cloud-muted sunlight, was tilted up to watch the sky. The afternoon was getting old. There was an egg of a moon in the sky over the ocean.
"I'm glad he asked you to go." He glanced over, and blinked when he found her watching him. He cleared his throat. "I'm not saying I wouldn't have gone if he'd asked--" he looked at her sharply. Quistis nodded, and he went on. "I'm just saying I'm glad it was you."
"I didn't do anything," she said.
"You went."
"I couldn't stop him from going out there. Not even when I knew it was..." Crazy. Suicidal. For Rinoa. "...impossible."
Irvine's smile was wry. "I haven't seen anybody who can stop Squall."
'Yet,' she wanted to say. You haven't been here, not for years. You don't know.
What she did say was, "True."
He shook his head. He held a handful of clover blossoms, and was working on twisting the stems into knots. Fragile as they were, he broke none.
Quistis caught herself worrying at the hem of her skirt. Brushing aside her daisy chain, she folded her hands neatly, and placed them in the precise center of her lap.
Very quietly, Irvine said, "I don't think I could've done something like that."
She clenched her hands, watching as her knuckles turned white, and her fingertips flushed red. She studied the white half-moon at the base of each thumbnail. There were moons everywhere. "Like what?" she asked. She didn't really need an answer. She knew perfectly well what he meant.
"I don't know," he said. "Like what he did. I guess." He shrugged. She saw it out of the corner of her eye, in the way his coat stirred and settled. "I don't know what I'd do with a girl like Rinoa."
"Oh," she said.
"I mean, look at you, Quistis. You end up in tight spots, but not something like that. You're the kind of girl a guy can depend on. You'd come after me, too, if I needed it."
She blinked. There were no moons. Just her own hands.
Maybe she hadn't known what he'd meant after all.
Her fingers unlocked. Capable once more, they smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt. "Do we have anything for dinner?" she asked.
Irvine looked at her, puzzled.
"There's what we bought in Esthar. Should be enough left for everyone. Well," he added, scratching at his chin, "maybe not for Zell."
Quistis smiled and got to her feet. She reached down, offering Irvine her hand. Gamely, he gripped it, and she pulled him up until he stood next to her.
When he let go, she found a chain of clover, tied end to flower, looped around her wrist.
She raised her arm until the flowers dangled in front of her face. "Where'd you learn to do this?"
"Right here." He smiled softly. "You taught me."
She tried. She really did. But this time, no matter how hard she concentrated, no memory surfaced.
Irvine brushed her shoulder. "Forget it," he said. "It's ancient history." He grinned. "You can teach me again later. C'mon. I'm hungry."
She pushed the bracelet up until it rode above her elbow, and they hiked back to the Ragnarok together.
Her daisy whip lay in the grass, forgotten, waiting for the tide to come in.