Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Lightning. ❯ hapter, the Fourty-Fifth: In Which there is… Halloween…? ( Chapter 45 )

Eoko: We're sorry for taking so long. To attempt to win back your love, we offer you another chapter!

Kitty: OMGosh! I love this chapter so much!

Eoko: It pwns. Go read it. Forgive us! -drops to knees and begs-

Kitty: Yes forgiveness! T_T

Chapter, the Fourty-Fifth: In Which there is… Halloween…?

Much as he loved Lightning, and much as he loved one Selphie Tilmitt, they were no substitute for one Zell Rubedo Dincht, and the love he had for the stocky fighter. Thus it was that Irvine Kinneas was almost – almost, mind you – hopping from foot to foot out the front of Balamb Garden, having responded to the news that Zell and Seifer were coming home.

Squall had sounded kind of shitty when he’d called, which really didn’t surprise Irvine much, after what had happened in his office. Sure, Squall’s sexy ‘n’ all… Irvine mused, but he knows just like everyone else I ain’t free game no more… This musing had come to him a lot since that odd encounter, and he was doing everything humanly possible to stay out of the Commander’s way.

All thought of Squall and his disquieting behaviour fled Irvine’s mind as a transport pulled up and a weary, really pissed off looking Seifer just about fell out of it. He shot the single most venomous glare he had ever given at Irvine, shrugged off the gloved hand laid on his shoulder, and stalked away. The hand was followed by its owner, who watched Seifer go with an unreadable look.

“Zell!”

The smile the fighter had for him made his insides melt and when Zell opened his arms, he was in them in a second, his own arms snaking around his lover’s body.

“Hey, baby…” came the soft, tender whisper. “Hyne, I missed you…”

“Likewise. So much.” His hands fisted in the back of Zell’s clothing, like a drowning man clinging to a floatation.

Zell hissed and flinched when Irvine’s tight hold pressed abused ribs and grazed skin, his body too tired to withstand anymore curing. The sharpshooter gave an affectionate grin and took him back to his room.

It wasn’t exactly as tidy as he remembered.

“You been sleeping in my room, Cowboy…?” he wondered teasingly, delighted by the blush that dusted his lover’s cheeks.

“I… I missed you and… your room… your bed… they…” The blush deepened. “They smell like you… I’ll tidy it up…”

Hyne. He was so gorgeous. Zell just wanted to lay him down and- He staggered, putting serious breaks on that train of thought, almost to the point of derailing it, but Irvine was there to catch him. He sometimes forgot, looking at the elegant, deceptively slender frame his lover possessed, that there was no small amount of strength in him. Exeter wasn’t light, and he’d seen how willful Lightning could be, if the sharpshooter didn’t keep a tight rein on the bird. Suffice it to say, he took Zell’s weight easily.

“Bath?”

“Oh, Hyne, yes…” he breathed and Irvine’s laugh warmed him to his toes.

“Sit down, darlin’.”

He sat the fighter down and Zell was happy to remain there while Irvine went to run the bath. He glanced around, a tender smile curving his lips at how easily the sharpshooter’s things had found places around his room, among his own things and Seifer’s.

Zell winced. Seifer. Seifer, Seifer, Seifer… Oh, if there were any mistake bigger than the one he’d made when he slept with the gunbladist, then he didn’t know what it was. It should have been obvious. Obvious! He wasn’t an idiot, and he wasn’t blind, so how hadn’t he seen it?

Seifer…

Seifer was in love with him.

Love? No. It wasn’t that. Was it? Oh, Hyne in heaven, was it? Did Seifer love him? If Seifer did love him, what did that mean?

Zell loved Irvine. Of that, he had no doubt. The way he’d felt when Irvine had refused to have anything to do with him when he found out who Rubedo really was and the way he felt now when the sharpshooter came out of the bathroom with a gentle smile for him attested to that… But he remembered Seifer’s hands along his skin, how the gunbladist’s mouth had worshipped him, how it had felt to be underneath him.

Zell shook his head to clear it when Irvine’s attention was elsewhere. He had been literally freezing to death at the time, and willing to do anything if just meant getting warm. He hadn’t had any choice.

His thoughts came back to the present when the sharpshooter helped him undress, then took him and settled him in the bath.

“I’ll go clean up the mess I made of your room. Yell if you need anythin’.”

Irvine straightened and started to turn, but Zell’s hand came up, dripping wet, to latch onto his sleeve.

“I need you… C’mere…” And he gave a tug.

Irvine yelped, overbalancing, and his hand went down to catch his weight, causing an almighty splash that soaked his sleeve almost all the way up to his shoulder.

“Zell!”

The fighter smirked and pulled again.

“At least let me get undressed!”

“I can undress you fine…” came the answering purr.

“You have any idea how much this jacket is worth?!”

Apparently, Zell’s obsessive need to have his hands all over Irvine hadn’t waned in the time he’d been gone, and the warm water had rejuvenating properties. The sharpshooter couldn’t say that it bothered him. He was an inch from giving in, lips already parting to welcome the tongue he knew would delve within, when the phone rang.

“Leave it,” Zell growled, sending a shiver down Irvine’s spine.

Irvine obeyed and after seven rings of drowning in Zell’s taste, the answering machine picked up.

“Hey. Zell here. If you’re sexy, male, and available, leave a message. If not… well, you can try.”

The sharpshooter snorted and started to tell Zell he really ought to change that message, when a shrill voice penetrated the happy fog that had started to inch around his brain.

“Irvine! I know you’re there! Stop sexing and answer the phone! Just because Zelly’s home doesn’t mean you can ignore the rest of us. Again. Pick up! Pick up! Pick up! Pick up, pick up, pickup, pickup, pickuppickuppickuppickup…”

And so it went on.

“I swear that girl is on drugs! Answer the phone before she shatters the windows…” Zell muttered and Irvine laughed, straightening and trying to squeeze out his sleeve as he left the bathroom. Zell watched him go, captivated by the ever-so-slight swing of his hips.

“Howdy, Sel- Fuck!”

Irvine winced and held the phone about a meter away from his ear, but he was still able to hear Selphie’s words clearly. He would even hazard a guess that Zell could hear them too.

“Irvine! Oh-me-gosh! D’you realise we missed Halloween?!”

Irvine stared blankly at the receiver, mind a little sluggish due to the repetitive urgings by other parts of his body that he shouldn’t be standing out here on the phone to a crazy brunette when a damn fine blond was waiting in the bath for him. Naked.

“Irvine, are you listening to me?!”

“Yeah…” he said vaguely, glancing at the bathroom door. “Listen, Selph, I’m real busy… Can this wait…?”

“No! Do you hear what I’m saying?! We missed Halloween!”

The sharpshooter’s brain finally clicked over into coherent thought, much to the disgruntlement of his more carnal thought patterns – his Id wasn’t impressed with having to take a back seat after days of being dormant. (1) He wondered how that particular holiday had managed to slip past without Selphie’s notice.

“How…?” he asked when he couldn’t come up with an answer.

There was silence for a moment, then a sheepish little giggle and he would swear he could hear the blush in her voice.

“I was on a mission. With Anasha.”

Irvine would almost bet Lightning that hadn’t been an accident. Too bad for Squall the little ninja had realised before it was way too late to do anything about it. Apparently, she had plans, which she leapt enthusiastically into an explanation of.

He hung up some fifteen minutes later with an abused eardrum and a voice in his head that sounded like a bizarre hybrid of his own and Selphie’s nattering on about various costumes.

Then his Id clicked back on and a smirk curved his lips. He took a moment to strip his clothes off – except the hat of course – and returned to the bathroom and his lover.

Zell’s smile wiped all vestige of coherent thought from his brain.

- - - - - - -

Selphie Tilmitt was not an organized sort of person. Her room was a happy disarray of SeeD mission briefings and reports, stuffed animals, nunchaku cleaning paraphernalia, clean and dirty clothes and any number of Anasha’s things. Her idea of filing was to pile everything on her table with vague ideas to get to it later. Yet, somehow, when it came to parties and the decorating for such, there was no one more organized.

Zell stood in the doorway to the ballroom with his mouth hanging open and Irvine behind him in much the same state. It had only been a few nights ago that Selphie had called with her frantic squealing about missing Halloween, yet in that time she had managed to organize all this. Rubber bats with luminescent eyes hung suspended from the ceiling, along with tarantulas which dropped to eye-level at indiscriminate intervals, scaring the pants off cadets and SeeD alike. Fake cobwebs bedecked every corner, and rubber snakes coiled their way around pillars and table legs. Several skeletons, human and monster alike, had been pilfered from the anatomy classrooms and set around the room. (Rikan had already put a pair of human ones in a questionable pose, much to the uproarious applause of an already-drunk Terry.) All in all, she’d done an amazing job.

“Oh! Could you two be anymore cute?!”

Irvine and Zell both winced at Selphie’s deafening squeal, partly because it was at a pitch that, if it were a couple of notes higher, it would be beyond human hearing range, and partly because neither of them liked being designated “cute”. It was so… faggy… But, Zell reasoned to himself, they probably were. Although, he could think of a better word than “cute” for how Irvine’s arse looked in those pants…

They had taken real liberties with the idea of what a prince ought to look like. Instead of the clinging tights storybook princes usually wore, Irvine was in purple leather pants, with a pair of knee-high black boots with silver buckles. They’d decided against the top-of-the-thigh length tunic as well, shortening it so that he showed some skin and so that the silver belt around his hips accentuated the curve of his waist. The “tunic” was purple and sleeveless, too, and Zell had taken great delight in painting the sharpshooter a tattoo on his shoulder which, if one looked hard enough, and went slightly cross-eyed, read “Zell’s”. He also wore a velvet, dark maroon cloak edged in gold that slithered delightfully across his behind whenever he moved, and instead of a crown he wore his cowboy hat, but with a thick blue feather stuck roguishly in the band. (2)

Zell was his knight. Seifer had helped him choose his outfit. After a day or so of avoiding one another, things seemed to have gotten back to normal, except that Zell found his eyes straying to the lines of the gunbladist’s body and his mind straying back to the night in the tent. Furthermore, he’d found his mouth straying to Seifer’s more than once, but he always managed to control himself before things got any hotter than hungry kisses.

Just as Irvine wasn’t a stereotypical prince, nor was his knight stereotypical either. There was really nothing very sexy about huge chunky bits of metal covering nearly every inch of one’s body, so he was only wearing a breast-plate, and he had a sword slung at his hip. The breast-plate was black, as were the tight leather (couldn’t let Irvine steal all the leathery glory) pants and the muscle shirt he wore beneath it. His arms had silver stenciled stars all down them and his hair, out of its spikes and falling across his eyes had been sprayed black and tipped in silver. Seifer said he remembered the patterns from a knight in a story Matron had read them, and Zell knew the fact he couldn’t remember didn’t mean it wasn’t true. His boots were silver with black crescent-moons stenciled on them and his sword hilt bore the same shape in silver, as did the scabbard.

“Irvine’s knight in shining armour!” Anasha enthused. She’d really been spending too much time with Selphie…

Irvine cocked his head. It was easy to see they were dressed as a pair, Anasha entirely in white, even to the point of painting her face and spraying her hair, aside from a black circle over her right eye. Selphie was the opposite, all black with a white circle over her left eye.

“I can see you’re Ying and Yang,” he said slowly. “But shouldn’t one of your dots be on your leg…?”

Selphie smirked.

“Just think about it, Irvy-kins,” she said brightly, then flicked her tongue out.

Irvine blinked and blinked again, then caught on, complete with a mental picture.

“Oh… Oh, Hyne, I did not need that! Go away!” And he flapped his hands at them. They ran off giggling, arms linked

“We should have thought of that,” Zell said with a smirk, eyes settling none too discreetly between Irvine’s legs.

“Yeah, well… Kiss me before I end up with nightmares from the thought of them thinking of that…”

“One knight in shining armour to the rescue,” Zell replied, sweeping his lover into his arms and bending him backward to lay a passionate and overly-theatrical kiss to his lips.

Sometime later, while Irvine was involved in an enthusiastic (slightly tipsy) conversation with another sharpshooter in a nurse’s outfit, it occurred to Zell he hadn’t seen Seifer yet. As if the thought had summoned him, the gunbladist’s voice spoke in his ear.

“You know, I think the only place I’ve seen more rubber is the sex-shop in Esthar…” it said, referring to the rubber creatures strung around the room.

Zell snorted and turned, mouth open with a ready retort, but he swallowed the words when he took in Seifer’s costume.

The gunbladist was shirtless, his skin shining with cobalt body-glitter. There was a golden sun painted over his navel, beams waving off in all directions from it. His tight jeans matched the glitter for colour and he held a staff in his right hand, its length patterned with white clouds and its end exploding into a sun. There was even gold glitter in his hair.

Zell’s first thought was that he couldn’t decide if his friend looked drop-dead gorgeous, or drop-dead faggy. His second made his eyes nearly pop out of his head as he suddenly realised the match – or perfect opposition – their costumes were.

“Seifer!” he hissed, realising he’d been duped. “Someone’s gonna notice.”

The gunbladist snorted, cradling the staff with the same easy grace he carried Hyperion.

“No they won’t. They’re too wrapped up in the idea of you being Irvine’s knight-with-a-K.” Zell winced at the sneer. “They won’t notice you’re also my night-with-an-N.”

And so he was, Zell knew. He was night. Seifer was day. Two sides of the one coin. Two halves of the same whole. Selphie and Anasha’s Ying and Yang with more subtlety. The gunbladist was a crafty bastard, Zell would give him that.

“Seifer,” Zell said desperately. “You’ve got to stop. We can’t – I can’t do this! I love Ir-”

“Dance with me.”

“No.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“You never do!” Zell’s voice was a low, dangerous hiss now. “You just assume! You didn’t ask if I wanted to be in this costume, you don’t ask if I want to dance, you don’t ask if I want you to kiss me… And that’s why. That’s why I’m not dancing with you.”

Zell turned, ducking out from under the hand that reached for his shoulder, and went back to Irvine, murmuring something in his ear that made him smirk and turn to nip at the fighter’s ear. The cowboy had grown a pair, Seifer would give him that much. He was also perfectly willing to give him a gunblade through the gut when Zell lead him onto the dance floor and the pair proceeded to engage in the vertical sex that was far more interesting than the ballroom dancing from earlier in the night.

Seifer snarled at a poor cadet who just happened to be walking past, then turned and stalked out of the ballroom. What the fuck did he care about some stupid party, anyway? He’d only spent the whole time watching Zell and plotting ways to turn him on without anyone noticing. So much for that idea – now he wasn’t even allowed to touch the fighter.

That was it. He was sick of pussyfooting around. The next time Zell’s will failed and he melted into Seifer’s body, accepting the seeking tongue within his mouth, the gunbladist wanted to be sure they would be caught, seen by the pansy-arse sharpshooter.

He wanted to hurt Irvine. He wanted to rip the cowboy’s soul bare and fling it in his face, the way his own soul was bared and flung. He wanted to take back what was his, take it from Irvine, make him bleed and sting and cry. He deserved it. Zell didn’t belong to him, Zell belonged to Seifer, and it was time he realised that.

It didn’t seem to occur to Seifer that Zell had made all the moves on Irvine. Nor did it seem to occur to him that to hurt Irvine so irrevocably would inevitably hurt Zell as well.

Only possessive anger occurred to him, the Alpha need to stake his claim and warn off competitors.

Irvine would pay for having his hands all over what wasn’t his…

- - - - - - -

(1) Go year twelve psychology lessons. Ten points to whomever knows what the Id is!

(2) When Eoko came here to visit, we were supposed to be going to a costume party on the Sunday night. We picked her up on Saturday, and took her to see a real football game that day. Anyway, I was going to this costume party as Puss-in-Boots, but I’d had real trouble finding a feather big enough for the hat. (You’ve all seen Shrek. You know what that feather looks like!) I’d settled on this bunch of smaller ones from Spotlight, but wasn’t happy with them.

So we’re wandering along down Bridge Road in Melbourne and what should I see but a vase absolutely full of massive feathers, so of course, in I go. I’m all like “Wow! They have huge feathers!” and Mum comes up behind me to inform me that’s because it’s a sex shop. Well, did I ever feel like an idiot. I couldn’t even bring myself to buy the feather, I just shot out of there like a bullet, Eoko laughing at me all the way. Poor Nanna got left behind in the sex shop, and Eoko’s never let me live the whole episode down…

I didn’t know it was a sex shop!!!

Eoko: Yea, and she’s short too. -smirks evilly-