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He carries a lantern in his left hand, a knife in his right.
The lantern sways as he steps closer, spilling out a soft orange light. The knife glints.
And he's always coming closer. Always.
It has been months since he was forcibly removed, after years of being melded to her mind, and still she cannot shake off his presence. In waking life and in sleep, Quistis knows he is there. Those sackcloth robes, those yellow eyes. Always watching.
She flips onto her back, and floats on the dark water. The stars overhead peer back down at her, indifferent. Impossibly distant.
She is thirty-two, and the others have all gone. Some to civilian life, marriage, families, and safe harbor. Some to rest under a lifeless square gray marker in Garden's cemetery. She used to visit often, kneeling quietly at the gravesides, and build pictures of them in her mind as best as she could. A gleaming smile, a flick of glossy hair, a sardonic raised eyebrow.
Not so often, anymore. Those little details are harder to remember now, and her mind is less willing to make the effort to drag them back to the surface.
Her Garden-issue wetsuit is tight and rubbery, constricting her neck, her wrists, her thighs. She has always hated these things. Garden does not supply its students with beach leisure wear, and Quistis has never had cause or opportunity to buy any. She has never swum in a bikini, never swum naked. She should have skinny-dipped tonight, she thinks. But even now, right at the end, she is Quistis Trepe, and there is a deeply-ingrained rigidity to her that she cannot quite bring herself to break.
He steps closer, and the lantern sways invitingly.
Quistis feels a slow trickle of relief welling up in her chest. The last step is coming. It is coming at last, and she is ready to stop fighting. She did not come here tonight, to Balamb's deserted Rinauld Coast, to push away her fear with an army of buzzing thoughts, a frantically diverted mind. No, she is tired of doing that. She came here to welcome the fear. To let the seawater amplify it, allow it to swell and heave around her, to truly feel it at last.
She closes her eyes and feels. A lifetime of fear. A lifetime of grudges.
Mrs. Trepe is on the phone, and Quistis is crouching on the stairs, unseen.
"We've tried, Hyne knows we've tried. We're simply not capable of providing the environment she needs. I... I was naive, imagining that I could take on such a damaged child, help her somehow, but there are some things that only professionals..."
Mrs. Trepe is sobbing into the receiver now, and Quistis is silent. Quistis is numb.
"I've tried so hard. It's been so hard. I don't even know if our marriage will recover. I just..."
Uprooted once more, and transplanted in Garden, where she had worked herself to the bone to show them that she was flawless. Outstanding. Exemplary. That she would never be a burden to anyone again.
How long had that self-deception lasted? A year, maybe two.
"...clear that your leadership qualities do not meet the level that the Garden organization expects from our staff. In light of that, the Faculty's decision..."
Dismissed with mere hours' notice, she had been taking orders from her own student within days. And she had swallowed the humiliation, for the greater good. Followed order after order without complaint. Sent to space, sent into Time Compression. That brief peak, a crested wave of glory and adulation, had dwindled so quickly. Back to work, back to the field. She had been sent on mission after menial mission.
Sent to retrieve her friends' bodies.
Sent an invitation to a wedding she could never attend. Sent photos of a baby, a child, children she would never meet.
Quistis is numb, again, in the face of her life laid bare. It is empty. As barren and devoid of color as the sterile white expanse of sand that sweeps across the bay.
No green shoots, she thinks. No place for hope to grow.
No great loss.
Those yellow eyes burn bright in the back of her mind. He steps closer, and it is time. She has been delaying it for months, years, a lifetime. But it is here now.
Damp, hardened sand coats the soles of her feet as she climbs the shore to the spot where she left her bag. Quistis is shivering in the night air, and the sensation brings her a visceral thrill, a taste of what is to come. She peels back the sleeves of the sodden wetsuit, and unwraps the tiny silver blade she has brought. There is still time to get there first, before he does. Still a few moments in which she can know that she made the choice. After a lifetime of following others, she will choose the ending.
Tonberry raises his knife, and—
—and the bright ribbon of blood proves to Quistis that she got there first.
"Why the hell'd you do it?"
Xu looks down at the bandaged wrists, and she cannot be anything other than painfully direct. Quistis has no energy to resent that. Xu is... Xu.
"Because it had to be me."
"What?"
"Because." She stares at the softly flapping gauze curtain with dull, unfocused eyes. "It had... to be me. No-one else."
"Good thing you fucked it up, then." Xu grins, uncomprehending. She pats Quistis' shoulder clumsily, with a hand that has two half-severed fingers. Quistis cannot even remember which mission it was that claimed Xu's digits.
"Right on the beach where the junior cadets were heading for their 6am para-magic practical. Was that on purpose?"
"No. It wasn't."
Quistis lapses into silence, and waits for her to leave.
"Xu," she says, when Xu is halfway to the door.
"I'm out. No notice period. I don't need the severance pay. Just get me out. Today."
It is to Xu's eternal credit that she doesn't even blink. "Consider it done, Quis."
She has rented an old artist's studio in Dollet. It has been years since the death of its previous tenant, and the cobwebs are plentiful, the layer of dust thick and sticky. Quistis has set about cleaning it, making a space for her own easel to stand.
Here, she paints. She paints shapes, dreamscapes, colors. The shapes of death and life, the colors of compressed time.
Xu still calls, every few weeks. Today is one of those days. Quistis sets down her palette of smeared reds and blacks, and presses the phone to her ear.
She listens. She rarely talks. Xu is good at talking, and Quistis has become good at listening. It works.
"—found a definite link to long-term junctioning of Tonberry. Cid's lawyers scrambled to bury the report, but—"
Quistis' eyes are on her canvas. In her mind, she can already see her next strokes forming.
"—ended up paying a fuckton of gil to O-Lab to seal the damn thing in Esthar. But knowing that shitbag Odine, he's probably got it hosting tea parties. Those little eyes—"
Quistis interrupts. "Don't."
"Oh. Yeah, sorry. All I'm saying Quis, is that it wasn't your fault. It didn't come from you. Okay? Wanted to tell you that."
"Were they successful?" Quistis asks.
"What?"
"The others. The suicide attempts."
"Not sure. I could check?"
"Then check."
There is a long pause. "Nah. All survived. Mostly dumb luck, like yours was." She hears the sound of Xu's fingers tapping on her keyboard, and a muffled exhaled breath. "Fuck. Youngest was seventeen."
"Quis. You still there?"
"Yes."
She is not sure what it means. All she knows is that he is gone. He left her, that night on the beach. Her fear, her grudges; he took it all with him.
Quistis paints for the rest of that evening. She doesn't usually paint people, but tonight she does. She builds them up little by little, using each lingering detail that they left behind. A gleaming smile, a flick of glossy hair, a sardonic raised eyebrow.
"I got out," she tells them, when she has finished. "I made the choice. In the end, it had to be me."
There is a little sapling, in the patch of land behind her studio that serves for a garden. It has been growing for months. She crouches over it the next morning, and sprinkles fresh water from cupped hands onto its young green leaves.
Quistis does not know what kind of tree it will become. She is looking forward to finding out.
She is thirty-three, and for the first time, she has a future.