Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Dragonfly ❯ What the hell's happening to me? ( Chapter 1 )

Dragonfly, By Saphire_in_the_mist

Disclaimer: I don't own anything but what I splurted out of my over-coffeined mind. Squaresoft owns the rest :-D

**Oh and a little warning, english is not my first language, so if you see any horrible unforgiveable mistake, sorry! :-P**

Chapter 1-What the hell's happening to me?

Seifer's alarm clock woke him up with a loud, obnoxious beeping, making him jump inside his bed, heart beating hard and head full of confused thoughts. Where was he?

He slowly sat up in his bed, massaging his temple with callused fingertips. The beeping was tearing his ears, piercing his foggy mind with shards of pain. his right hand blindly srearched for the stop button on the alarm clock pannel, but numb fingers could not pick up the right one, and the beeping, as to nag him, seemed to raise a good octave.

In a gesture of pure anger, seifer just ripped the alarm clock from the wall and threw it accross the room, crashing loudly against the gunblade poster he had stretched on the opposite wall. Thankfully, the beeping had ceased. Seifer's eyes closed in relief as he drank the newborn silence. Soon enough they popped open. Where was he again? Did he knew this place?

A knocking at the door. Someone was talking to him through the metal. A man, with a voice he known, yet still he couldn't remember who it belonged to. The blonde man groaned as he stood up and walked to the door only in his tight boxer shorts and socks. The door slid open to reveal a shorter blonde man, spiky-haired and blue-eyed, a questionning gaze in his saphire pupils and a small grin twitching his lips. He seemed familiar. Well, especially the hair. Seifer stood in front of him, silent, in the hope the man would talk first and wouldn't notice he couldn't remember who he was.

"What the hell are you doin', Almasy, you woke up the whole north dorm with that noise!"

"M'sorry", he muttered, hoping it would be a good reason for the other guy to go away. To the gunblader' dismay, the spiky-haired tried to push past him, but Seifer concentrated all the intimidation power he held in one single green glare. The small man stopped dead on his track. The silence again, and Seifer was sure he had seen an angel passing between them with a stupid peaceful smile.

"Not feelin' talkative uh?", the young man concluded with a small grin. "Okay, I'll see ya in the training center then!" The blonde finished his sentence while quickly turning around and running down the dorm hallway, followed by the sound of his running shoes squeaking on the waxed floor.

"Good", Seifer mumbled while closing his door. He walked away to his tiny bathroom, the only real privilege his SeeD status brought to him. He had a headache, a horrible headache, like a sledgehammer pounding inside his head, and it created a deep, pulsating tension that would spreads all over his body and send little sparks of pain through his muscles. God he felt bad.

He couldn't remember exactly when it all began. Seifer had always been a strong man. Even as a kid, he couldn't remember ever being sick. He was a force of nature and was proud of it. Nothing ever brought him down...well, he thought he could remember something bringng him down, some years ago. Something very bad. And very painful. But he got over it, apparently, since he was there today.

Then came this throbbing inside his skull...and his skin that seemed to get thinner and thinner everyday...and that unhealthy grey glow surrounding him...

"I'm going crazy", he said aloud to his cadaver-like reflection.

The loss of memory came earlier in the week. Maybe 4 days ago. Before, there was a thick mud of pain and lots of it. First, he would forget stupid things like junctioning tips, or meetings. Then all of a sudden he'd wake up and couldn't tell where he was, or were he'd been the day before. Dr. Kadowaki couldn't find anything wrong with him. She said he could have been training too hard, or not slept enough in the last months. Seifer knew he hadn't changed his habits much since his childhood. But he lied to the woman in front of him, concerned about him. Just for her to stop worrying about him. He was okay. He was just a little too tired. His powerful features had helped hide the fact that he was in fact a lot weaker than he looked. Dr. Kadowaki left him alone. At least for the last few weeks.

"Like hell I am okay", he whispered as he saw his reflection in the mirror over the sink. Dead eyes, surrounded by the blue depths of his tiredness. No matter how many hours he'd spend asleep -up to 10 hours per night lately- he'd wake up so sucked dry he could barely walk, and let alone eat. He would still go down to the cafeteria two times a day, pick up various food and drinks and bring them back in his dorm, where he'd just throw them in the garbage. All his attempts at putting food in his stomach ended in very painful vomitings. Lately not even liquids were allowed in him. He'd throw them out just like the rest.

He felt cold.

Taking a bath would be safer than a shower, considering he could hardly stay still while standing up. The hot, steamy water fell in the bathtub. He tested it with the reverse of his hand. Boiling. He really needed that. Seifer stepped out of his boxers. The feel of the very hot water made him shudder, but the pain washed away as his tensed body relaxed in the heat. He dove his head into the water and laid back, sighing with a mix of content and desperation. He knew everything would

"What on holy hell is happening to me?"

**~<>~**

Just as Seifer sunk into his bath, a door opened in the girls' dorm, and a short girl walked out of her bedroom, followed by her long dark chocolate hair. Well short was a word that didn't really fit her. Tiny was a better word. Those words, Kirah Sabin heard them all the time. She had always been shorter than the other kids. She had grown up normally and she was healthy, and well-proportionated. Now at the gates of adulthood, she was just a very short woman. And although she was definitely not up to compete with the Garden's popular beauties, her creamy complexion, black eyes and full pink lips embedded in a heart-shaped face surprisingly got her more than one devoted fan, althought she tried to keep herself away from flirting.

She didn't hated being so short. In fact, that's what attracted men to her, normally. Because she would normally not go past any man's shoulders, they all had this automatic reflex of protecting her. At first it bothered her. But with time, she began to like being hugged thighly, held closer in a crowd, and especially when slow-dancing with a boy. God how she felt good, her head resting on a powerful chest, listening to the beat of the music mixed with the man's heartbeat...so little and delicate she was, she had developped a strong attraction for tall men. Over six feet were what she craved the most. And she would never look at any guy shorter than six feet.

It was shallow. And Kirah was perfectly aware of it. But at seventeen, she could still allow herself ot be a bit immature.

Kirah was currently heading for the communal showers, which junior classes had to use because there were no bathroom in their dorms. Communal showers had to be the most disgusting place in the whole garden. Even the dumpster couldn't hold as many bacterias as the junior showers. Barely even cleaned, they smelled like sweat, mildew and chlorine. Some of the shower stalls were covered in slimy brownish stuff. Kirah wouldn't be surprise if those disgusting stains mutated and started attacking people. Still, she needed her shower before heading down to her first course of the day. She'd just bring a knife down the shower stall, just in case...

In the lockers, many girls would unpolitely stare at her, eyes filled with surprise or, worst, mockery. True, she wasn't really the kind of image SeeDs would use in their promotion flicks. They were probably wondering how Headmaster Cid could accept such a dwarf.

"I could show you all, bitches, why I am here," She thought angrily.

Walking to her locker, Kirah kept staring right in front of her and did her best to ignore the chuckling behind her back. She removed the long black velvet skirt she wore and passed her silky red tank top over her head, before tossing it all into a pile in the locker.

Tidiness has never been her thing anyway.

She passed in front of the bitches again, in all her naked glory this time. Her body was fully shaped, with round, smooth hips and delicate well-hung breast. Nothing to be ashamed of, althought she sometimes wished she could be a bit-just a bit- thinner. She was not a kid, she was a woman, and she liked to remind people that fact, since they tended to forget it so easily.

So, a bit of an exhibitionnist, too. She was sometimes ashamed of that part of her personnality.

In the middle of her slightly rounded belly, a jewel hanged from the piercing on her navel. A silver dragonfly, a dark ruby tucked in its head.

Dragonflythat was how her mom used to call her. She bought her the jewel just before she left for Garden. And she also pierced the navel, at the same occasion. Her mom was high on two things: Good principles and traditions. And apparently the family's tradition was to have a hole pierced somewhere before becoming an "adult". Which probably made her cooler than most of the other moms on Gaia.

Memories rode into her mind as she turned the hot water on and carefully soaped every corner of her body. Her mother. A strong, giving woman who had sacrificed her life away to take care of hundred of people, including Kirah and her 5 older sisters. She had nicknamed her younger girl "dragonfly" because, she used to say, she was the tiniest yet the most dangerous of them all. Just like a dragonfly, she has an agressive nature hidden inside a threat-less body. Kirah remembered her infantile, innocent terror when mom showed her baby dragonflies catching tadpoles underwater and slowly eating them alive. Back then, it was the upper horror her infantile mind could picture.

If she had known all the others that awaited in the patient line of a lifetime...

Kirah washed the hurtful thoughts out of her head as she washed the shampoo out of her silky hair. Then she turned off the stream and walked out of the showers, careful not to slip on the tiled floor or get her foot stuck in the brown stuff.

Back at her locker, she noticed all the other girls were gone. Smiling, she put a hand in her wet hair and concentrated a few seconds. A hot draft washed through the hair and left it totally dry and combed. When wet, her braids reached her knees. But dry, they were up her butt.

Kirah chuckled to herself. Just a little power. Just when she was alone. She had to keep her skills up.

**~<>~**

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